Salmon Migration Videos Are a Cold Splash of Water for Your Pandemic Ennui

Rabbit Holes is a recurring series in which writers pay homage to the diversity and ingenuity of the ways we procrastinate now. To pitch your personal rabbit hole, email humaninterest@slate.com.

Most of the time, I feel lucky to grow up today. At 24, my grandmother was already a wife and a mother. At 24, my mom was still living at home, as her family assumed she would until marriage. At 24, I should—at least according to modern expectations for young adults—have already flown far away from the nest. And I did, for a time. Yet due to a pandemic and an expired lease, I’ve been living with my parents—like so many other millennials—for the past 10 months, working remotely from my childhood bedroom, lapsing into my moody teenage self, and sometimes, when trying to distract myself from my lack of a plan for moving out, watching videos of salmon.

These are not your typical charming animal videos of ferrets befriending pigs or dogs bopping into mirrors. Instead, my YouTube history is teaming with aerial footage tracking droves of salmon as they swim thousands of miles upstream to the rivers where they were born. Overlaid with dramatic instrumentals and David Attenborough–like voice-overs, the fish launch themselves up waterfalls, leapfrog fish ladders, and even fly over dams with the help of “salmon cannons.” Sockeye salmon, long and red like chili peppers, dye the rivers a deep red; pink salmon break the surface of the water with their humped backs. Hook-jawed and googly eyed, salmon are far from beautiful. But these days, I can’t help but find them inspiring and clarifying in the way I think about growing up and leaving home.

My thing for salmon began when I read too much about them for a college assignment, a project I talked about so much at the time that my friends gave me salmon birthday cards and salmon hair clips and a hard time for ordering salmon at restaurants. But it’s not the fish I loved so much as it was their story. Almost all salmon species complete a migration that’s epic in scope: Salmon trek from rivers to the ocean as adolescents, only to come home, years later, to spawn in their home rivers, sometimes just yards from where they were born. People travel to watch their homecoming. Poets pay homage. And thousands of videos of the journey grace the internet.

Take, for example, this Nat Geo Wild video, “The Salmon’s Life Mission.” A soothing Scottish voice sets the scene: On a thunderous autumn day in Scotland, when the water level is high, Atlantic salmon prepare to swim upstream to their home rivers. “But there’s a problem,” our narrator warns. The salmon, loitering at the base of a waterfall, must travel up. “It’s a game of persistence and luck.” Cue the violins. Salmon jump out of the water, pumping their bodies as if swimming through the air. “Although they fail time after time, their desire to push on is so strong they never give up,” our narrator says as one salmon succumbs to cascading water. The strings swell, the drums surge, and then a single salmon leaps, once more, out of the water.

“Why I feel emotional watching this….?” one viewer comments. “This is motivating af,” another adds. The appreciation continues: “Nature teaches us what is most important in life, love and children.” The salmon, after all, are taking on this journey for the sake of their offspring, whose eggs can survive only in the shallow waters of highland rivers.

It’s easy, with videos like this one, to cast salmon as characters in their own bildungsroman. Teenage salmon “smolt” and adapt their bodies for the challenges of the saltwater real world before traveling with their peers to the big, wide ocean. There, they grow up, change colors to attract mates, and return home to settle, having babies next door to where they were raised. Anthropomorphizing salmon in this way is comforting. It gives into an ideal that we want, and often expect, for ourselves—that there’s a natural order to growing up, an inevitable path toward adulthood.

Yet salmon migration isn’t as neat as this tale suggests. One video soundtracked by an inappropriately perky fiddle captures dozens of bears stationed along an Alaskan river during a salmon run, ready to pounce. Suddenly, a bear gallops away the from others, a salmon clasped in its mouth like a chew toy. Between natural and man-made obstacles (such as dams and warming waters), in some cases just under 1 of every 100 salmon survive the journey back. And while environmentalists work to aid the process, particularly for endangered populations, the salmon’s survival comes down to luck and physical strength—success that goes unrewarded considering that some species die after spawning. Salmon migration is not a family reunion or sacrifice for a better life. It’s a natural cycle, devoid of any agency, that assigns all salmon, generation to generation, the same course.

The more I watch these videos, sitting at a desk in my parents’ bedroom, at times mildly panicked that I don’t have a five-year plan never mind a five-month one, the more I realize that comparing salmon’s journey to humans’ entirely misses the point. What distinguishes us from other animals is our ability to make decisions that sometimes move us away from the rest of the pack. Growing up and forging our own path has never been as linear as it is in the animal world—nor should we want it to be. My grandmother was settled down at 24, yet she broke away from tradition when she emigrated from Italy at 13 and never returned. She wanted her daughter, my mom, to live at home until she met a nice Italian boy, and yet at 26, my mom moved out and later married an Irishman. And while I thought I’d be living on my own by now—a conventional indication of capability and maturity—the pandemic upended all plans, granting me instead a seemingly unnatural, but lovely, period with my parents. Again.

As I watch videos of the animal kingdom, its subjects following their prewritten paths, I realize the very autonomy I crave is found in the way I can choose to reroute the path to adulthood. There’s no one natural order to growing up, and only once I release myself from that expectation do I understand that I can be making progress even if, for now, I remain in one place, the most familiar place. Deciding to live at home for now—and, moreover, letting myself be content with that—might be the most adult decision I’ve made yet.

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An “Ex-Detranstioner” Disavows the Anti-Trans Movement She Helped Spark

This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.

Though the mainstream press—especially in the U.K., but not only there—often presents detransition as a deep, dark secret of the transgender community, the issue is actually pretty simple: Something like 1 percent to 3 percent of people who begin a gender transition ultimately decide it’s not for them, and they backtrack or travel elsewhere across the landscape of gender identity. It’s a straightforward question of individual needs, and no cause for alarm—at least not in the abstract.

However, in some cases, a person who once transitioned will turn against the concept of trans identity itself. These people form activist groups around the idea that “gender ideology” was the source of their confusion and pain. They call themselves “detransitioners,” and they advocate for limiting access to medical transition in the name of protecting others from making what they see as their mistakes. Detransitioners consider trans acceptance as something akin to a cult—and, as I can attest as a trans man and journalist who has tweeted critically of them before, they can respond with pronounced hostility toward anyone who questions their beliefs.

Now, some former members of this so-called detransition movement have themselves grown disillusioned with detransition orthodoxy and are starting to speak out. They report that, despite their efforts to change, they’re still trans. They want people to know that the detransition movement couldn’t fix them—indeed, they never needed fixing in the first place.

They want people to know that the detransitioned women’s movement couldn’t fix them—indeed, they never needed fixing in the first place.

Ky Schevers is the most prominent of these apostates to date. She started to transition to male when she entered college, before later ending her transition. (She now again identifies as transmasculine—think more Elliot Page, less Chaz Bono—and uses she/her pronouns.) From 2013 to early 2020, Schevers published under the name CrashChaosCats, writing and vlogging regularly about her detransition and the beliefs that led her to it. She was interviewed for two major articles on detransition, both by cisgender female journalists: Rachel Monroe for the Outline in 2016, and Katie Herzog for the Stranger in 2017. Both pieces tell the story of Schevers identifying as male when she entered college, starting testosterone therapy soon after her mother’s death by suicide, and going off testosterone while still identifying as genderqueer. They end with her giving up her genderqueer identity and embracing the idea that not only her gender dysphoria but all gender dysphoria was false and caused by internalized sexism combined with trauma—an idea that she then did much to advance and proliferate online.

Today, however, Schevers has recanted this view. According to her, like the ex-gays of the 1990s and 2000s—many of whom claimed they “overcame” their sexuality after religious conversion, only to reaffirm it later—some detransitioned people still struggle in private against feelings of gender dysphoria that they can never fully suppress. “It’s very similar to ex-gay communities where there’s a story out there that people ‘change’ and it’s great and everything,” she told me. “No one really changes. They learn to keep their desires under control.”

Detransitioners may be a small group—even the highest estimates are in the hundreds, compared with an estimated number of transgender-identified people in the low millions—but they have been influential in pushing their denial that trans identity is real. Publicly, detransitioners disavow not only their individual transition histories but also the fact that transition helps trans people worldwide to live comfortably in their own skin. Although a few men also identify as detransitioned, most of the community congregates in sex-exclusive online forums for detransitioned women only. They believe gender dysphoria is common among women and disappears when they learn to love and accept their female bodies.

Detransitioned women have gained influence because of strong interest in their stories by both anti-trans activists and some journalists. In addition to being featured in countless horror stories aimed at frightening parents of gender-nonconforming youth and undermining trans people organizing for their rights, this influence translated to a major loss for trans rights in the U.K. last December, when Keira Bell, a detransitioned woman, successfully argued in court that doctors and parents of transgender youth were incapable of helping them to navigate decisions about transition-related treatment without court oversight.

The Bell case was what finally prompted Schevers to go public with her criticisms of the detransitioned women’s movement, despite being one of its founders. “It was Keira Bell in the U.K., and seeing how detransition can be used to dramatically affect trans people’s access to health care,” she said. “People give a certain weight to those [detransition] stories. We always tried to emphasize that there were a lot of us, but the gatherings that took place were not large. They never got more than 30 women, and not all of them were detransitioners.” She added, “Trans people deserve access to support, and it makes no sense to shut down people’s access to medical transition just because some people end up detransitioning.”

At 35, Schevers is no longer saying she was wrong about everything, either in her transition or her detransition. She now identifies as “a transmasculine butch dyke, genderqueer, something like that,” she told me, and her she/her pronouns contrast with her male-sounding voice and masculine presentation. She doesn’t think that every single detransitioned woman is really trans, and understands that others may have different experiences. Schevers believes strongly that every person deserves the right to question their gender identity and find their own paths.

She recognizes the good in her detransition experience, explaining: “There’s not always space in trans and queer communities for transmasculine people to talk about internalized misogyny. I could talk about it openly without worrying that people were going to be upset by it.” She even sees the good in some of the ideology, which is based in radical feminist ideas about internalized misogyny and male violence. “Not all the radical feminist ideas were terrible either: I learned a lot about women’s history,” Schevers said. “A lot of what I read was pretty interesting, so I’m glad that I explored that stuff.”

Still, as the detransition community Schevers helped spark grew, its repressive and transphobic sides eventually became too much to ignore. Schevers also found her gender dysphoria, which she once thought had disappeared for good, began to come back strongly over time. “My sense of being a woman unraveled, and I was feeling more like a dude or a gender weirdo,” she recalled. “But I was fighting against these feelings because I’d built a life in the detransition community, and I knew a lot of the other women in the community wouldn’t be happy with it if I came out as trans. I tried to explain it in a radical feminist framework, and find the root causes, and do everything to make these feelings go away, and that didn’t really work. The only thing that did work to make them go away was accepting them. I had to make a move to accept them.”

As the detransition community Schevers helped spark grew, its repressive and transphobic sides eventually became too much to ignore.

A second ex-member of the detransitioned women’s community, whom I’ll call Max, confirmed Schevers’ characterizations. Max (who identifies as transmasculine and asked to use she/her pronouns “for now”) requested to use a pseudonym and that this article avoid identifying details, because she’s fearful of the harassment that detransitioned women—and their anti-trans allies—direct against trans people who disagree with them.

Schevers and Max don’t know each other. While Schevers was becoming disillusioned and distancing herself from detransition circles, Max (in her early 20s) was beginning to explore detransition. She said she would watch Schevers’ detransition videos “obsessively.” Later, Max watched the negative response to Schevers leaving the community with discomfort.

Unlike Schevers, Max was never a prominent detransitioner, although for a time her social media accounts attracted a following from detransitioners and anti-trans activists. Like Schevers, Max feels some insights gleaned from her time in the detransitioned women’s community were worthwhile, particularly about the misogyny in the transmasculine community and learning to grapple with the feeling that there was no place to freely express doubts, fears, or regrets as a trans person. As a person of color, Max also has strong criticisms of how trans peers responded to her nonwhiteness, and of racism in the trans community at large.

After coming out and beginning medical transition in college, Max had doubts that were exacerbated by complications from her treatment. She began reading and posting in online forums dedicated to detransition and eventually asked her friends and family to return to using she/her pronouns for her. She still feels she transitioned much too quickly and thinks poorly of the therapist she saw during her transition. However, it didn’t take long before hateful attitudes toward trans people and widespread pressure not to retransition in the community began to trouble her.

“I was feeling really confused about my gender and really frustrated about it, and frustrated with having to go on testosterone,” Max said. “I thought, maybe I wouldn’t need testosterone by immersing myself in that community. But I realized, ‘I still want T—but I really feel like I shouldn’t.’ Why did I feel like I shouldn’t? I felt like I shouldn’t because I’d been gulping down TERF rhetoric,” she said, referring to the beliefs of trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

Asked why she wanted to speak up, Max offered up her harshest criticisms of the movement: “I guess the biggest thing for me was realizing I was taken advantage of. I was very recently trans and very recently detrans, and people basically used my experiences as ammunition against trans people. I let it slide, for a while, because I was so used to being ignored and even ostracized by the trans community.”

In talking to former and current members of the detrans community, I also spoke with people who described their experiences differently. Not everyone who detransitions experiences dysphoria again or holds transphobic views, emphasized one detransitioned 18-year-old from the U.K. “I’d like people to know that detrans women genuinely possess a variety of viewpoints, and painting us all with the same brush doesn’t help anyone,” she said. This young woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said transition may help dysphoria for some people and that she doesn’t take issue with trans women using women’s restrooms. She also believes that every study that shows medical transition is widely effective has major flaws, and that her own gender dysphoria stemmed from internalized misogyny. She said confronting those misogynistic attitudes has reduced her own gender dysphoria a great deal.

Because of her very visible and central role in the detrans community, Schevers takes a lot of the responsibility for its most toxic aspects. Schevers is clear that she now believes she, and others in the community, hurt trans people by telling them their dysphoria was internalized misogyny that would go away if they loved themselves enough. The detrans community, with her as a participant, also hurt trans people by allying with extreme anti-trans activists and giving them political ammunition against trans people, making detransition stories a central feature of anti-trans fearmongering and supporting activism aimed at limiting access to medical transition.

Schevers hopes that by putting her real name on this story and describing the patterns she helped perpetuate, her words will ring true, despite her history of saying very different things than what she says now. One such pattern is treating the desire to transition as if it were a drug addiction—a persistent impulse to be guarded against throughout a formerly transitioned person’s life. Schevers shared evidence of language detransitioned women had plucked from self-help groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, applied to the ongoing desire to appear male—terms like triggers and phrases like we commit that are instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the language of 12-step programs. Not incidentally, this is exactly how many in the ex-gay movement view persistent romantic desires for members of the same sex.

Contrary to these methods, the goal of transition is not to temporarily stave off gender dysphoria, treating it as a lifelong struggle against “triggers,” but instead to drastically reduce or eliminate such feelings, permanently. Numerous studies, representing an overwhelming medical consensus, support this approach. Thousands of trans people, including this reporter, can testify to the relief transition provides. Regret is rare—far rarer than the regret rates of other comparable treatments. This does not mean transition works for every single patient. No treatment can claim 100 percent success, and people with doubts and regrets about transition are real and deserve safe, affirming spaces to discuss these feelings. It does mean that transition is an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, transition—and not any amount of radical feminist ideology, self-help, or anti-trans paternalism—is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria that currently exists.

The ex-gay movement is much diminished (though far from gone) these days, after many of its leaders have publicly come out as gay and admitted that, as hard as they prayed, the gayness never truly went away. Schevers and Max’s stories are an early sign that, in time, the “detransition movement” may be destined for the same ignoble fate.

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Dear Care and Feeding: My MIL Won’t Stop Feeding My Kids Secret Junk Food

Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here or post it in the Slate Parenting Facebook group.

Dear Care and Feeding,

As work intensified during the pandemic, my mother-in-law has been graciously helping out with laundry, cooking, and cleaning. With a toddler and a baby, we feel she’s been a godsend. The issue is around food: I grew up poor and with not so great a diet, so it’s been important to me to feed the kids well: limited or no processed food, no foods with added sugar, very rare sugary baked goods or candy. Also, I try to serve them fruit with their meals (as opposed to dessert). I never limit the amount of food they eat except for bananas (after 1 they can have just about anything else).

I had a period of time where I picked up tons of hours at work and grandma flexed her muscles: more muffins and bagels, daily cheeseburgers, secret cookies. I’ve caught her on numerous occasions feeding the little one snacks to stall him while she’s doing something else instead of getting him to sleep. This will be right after the kids have had a full meal. This scares me because I want to teach the kids to eat when they’re hungry, not when they’re agitated or bored.

My husband and his brothers are morbidly obese and emotional eaters. I’m also not too great in this department either, though I try. At one point she complained that I feed the kids one way and then eat dessert at night (often after a 13 hour work day). When she pointed that out I was a hypocrite in the hopes of getting me to let her feed them differently, I just threw out the processed sugar in my own diet. She got so angry she stopped eating for a full day, making a big production of sitting at the table and not eating.

I’m at my wits end here. My husband is 100 percent on board with how we feed the kids because this is what we worked out and did before she moved in, but he’s overwhelmed with work too. (I also found out she was giving him secret cookies too!) He also thinks I should let her have more control because she’s helped so much, but I don’t think that’s a great reason to compromise on the kids’ health. When work calmed down a bit, I took back more of the kids’ food prep, but then the older one told me she snuck him candy. Caught, she admitted it, but said it was her prerogative and he’d behaved so well. Work is going to pick up again soon, and I don’t know what to do. How do I help her foster better habits for my family? Is there a kind way to communicate to my MIL that I’m grateful for the son she raised and that my feeding my kids differently is not a problem for her to solve?

— The Not So Sweet Life

Dear Not So Sweet,

Yikes, this is a thorny beast of a problem. I thought at first that the issue was simply that you and your MIL have different ideas about how to feed your family, but the secret cookies, sneaky candy, and most of all the drama-queen hunger strike she pulled when you changed your own diet paint a different picture. At the risk of stating the obvious, I want to make this clear: Her behavior has been pretty appalling. When you ask someone to do something one way when taking care of your kids and they do it another way, repeatedly, and then get angry and act out when you call them out about it, that’s a serious violation of trust. If a paid caretaker pulled something like this, you’d fire that person immediately.

As you say, times aren’t normal and her help has been essential. And also, she’s your husband’s mom. But even though you can’t fire her, you need to establish crystal clear boundaries if she’s going to continue to help you with your household and kids, and your husband needs to take a very active role in setting them and in helping you to enforce them. You both need to sit down with her and lay down the law: no sneaking, no lying. The issue is trust, and you need to frame it that way, for her and for yourself. Because the thing is, the kids’ health will not be harmed, short-term, by the uptick in candy and cheeseburgers. Their relationship to food, however, stands to be damaged if they perceive some food as shameful and illicit. They also need to be able to trust the adults in their life to be consistent about the rules.

Dear Care and Feeding,

I need some help. My normally silly, bright, typical 5-year-old is becoming increasingly anxious and neurotic as the pandemic continues to drag on. It started a few months ago when he saw my husband throw out some bread that had gotten moldy. Ever since then, every speck on his food has become potential mold. Then it moved on to germs and dirty things, where he’ll say things like, “I walked near the litter box. Do I need to wash hands?” The most extreme example was recently when my husband came home and my son, feeling the air from the open door, asked if he would get sick because air from outside touched him. We answer his questions about germs, mold, COVID, vaccines, etc. honestly and (I think) in an age appropriate way, and we reassure him all the time that our job as parents is to keep him safe, but all the talking doesn’t seem to alleviate his anxiety.

Today, he had a full meltdown while helping my husband take the recycling downstairs (it was my son’s idea to help, and something that he does pretty often). He stood by the bins shivering and crying, and came upstairs saying he needed to take a bath, even though he didn’t touch anything other than the pizza box he carried downstairs. There are other things aside from fixation on things that are worrying me. He sometimes says he can’t fall asleep because he’s afraid he’s going to die. He hits himself and says he doesn’t like himself when he gets reprimanded for even the smallest things. Every day something comes up that he’s freaked out about. I’m getting worried about his mental health, and I don’t know how to help him. My husband and I are both anxious people, too, but we’ve been trying so hard to stay calm through this. We want to help our kid feel safe, but it’s hard when the world feels so scary. How can I help my kid understand that not everything is going to make him sick or kill him?

— Anxious Mom of an Anxious Kid

Dear Anxious Mom,

I’m not any kind of psychology expert or doctor, but it sounds to me like it’s time for you to consult someone who is an expert or doctor. Fortunately, the intervention strategies you develop in partnership with a professional are probably going to help him a lot. Early in the pandemic, we heard a lot about how “surprisingly resilient” kids are, and while that may be blessedly true in some cases for some kids, it doesn’t apply to every kid—far from it. I hope you can find a therapist who’s affordable or covered by your insurance; I know so many of us can’t. There may also be counseling available via your son’s school, even if the school isn’t currently in session, or other community resources available. Find someone you trust to support him and to help your family find ways to cope with the incredibly challenging reality we’re all facing. You will be able to help him understand that not everything is potentially lethal, but you can’t do it on your own, and you shouldn’t have to.

· If you missed Sunday’s Care and Feeding column, read it here.

· Discuss this column in the Slate Parenting Facebook group!

Dear Care and Feeding,

I just wanted to say I did a TV free week with my 3-year-old and no one lost their mind. It turns out, she was fairly chill about the experience. Although she did ask to watch every day, she moved on quickly when I reminded her we were taking a break. What I actually needed to increase was not her capacity for solving her own boredom, but my own tolerance for frequent interruptions and occasionally, my ability to set boundaries for time apart, under the same roof, to pursue our own tasks. Also, I see more clearly now that TV can become a snooze button for your child’s needs: connection, snacks, the bathroom, more stimulating play, rest, moving their body. But the need is still there and often more urgent once the show is over.

This is why kids can seem so intensely whiny/disregulated/etc. after watching too much TV. Her emotions are steadier on TV free days, so much so that I find myself feeling guilty for not realizing before. And lastly, if there is TV built into predictable spots in your routine, it can be really hard to imagine there is anything else you could be or would rather be doing. Ask any adult (me) who watches Netflix most evenings or phone zones in bed every night. But kids often have better imaginations than adults, and the TV trench in their brain is not as deep. You can take advantage of that and let them take the lead on filling the empty block of time. Long story short, if you’ve been scared to embark on a TV free week after a slide (COVID or otherwise) you can do it!

— I Do Still Miss That Nap Though

Dear I.D.S.M.T.N.T.,

Please don’t waste another moment feeling guilty about not realizing before that your daughter was so easily capable of going TV-free! We all get into ruts and patterns where TV is concerned, and this stuff also changes based on kids’ ages and stages. I love your explanation of how TV can become a snooze button for little kids, and I totally agree. I’m really happy to hear that this worked for you!

All of that being said, I think it’s important for all of us to keep in mind that we might still need to lean on TV more than usual during the pandemic. If that’s the case, your example shows that we can still course-correct more easily than we might think possible when it’s time to get back on track. You now know this for a fact, which is super empowering. So don’t feel bad if you backslide. The awareness of your own capabilities that you’ve gained is a meaningful, lasting achievement, regardless of how much TV anyone watches now or in the future.

For more of Slate’s parenting coverage, listen to Mom and Dad Are Fighting

Dear Care and Feeding,

Both my sons have participated in a highly selective club soccer program since they were 10 years old. My oldest was pretty good at soccer but decided to apply to colleges regardless of their soccer programming. He ended up at a school that was a great fit for him. He plays club/rec soccer on the weekends and has made strong friendships. My younger son is much better at soccer objectively—to the point where he’s started getting noticed by D2 schools. He’s announced he wants to play in college and, when he starts applying in the fall, will only apply to schools that fit his soccer specifications.

Here’s the problem. I’ve seen many alumni of my sons’ soccer program play in college, and nearly all regretted it. They wound up at colleges that weren’t the right fit socially or academically—often getting hurt and then having to sit out for a full season, having difficulty making friends, etc—and even if things did somewhat work, they spent all their time practicing, effectively barring them from doing the exploration that’s so crucial in college. I’ve seen this in my nieces and nephews as well. The colleges my son is looking at for their soccer programs are NOT a good fit for him socially/academically, and I don’t want college to be a continuation of his high school experience—sacrificing exploration and experimentation for the sake of soccer.

We are paying for college and are close to putting our foot down and forcing him to broaden his college list. I do not want to pay for him to attend a poor-fit school where he plays soccer all day. He will not qualify for a D1 scholarship, and even if he did, I would be even more concerned about opportunity cost and overspecialization. Do you have any suggestions for how we can navigate the college search process in a way that respects his wishes, but also sets him up for success beyond just the athletic realm?

— No Sports in College, Please!

Dear No Sports,

The good news, though I know you might not believe me, is that your son might end up thriving no matter where he goes to school. He could also transfer. I think parents and teenagers who are caught up in the college application process sometimes forget that this is an option, but actually more than a quarter of college students don’t finish where they started. And no wonder! It’s crazy that we expect people in their late teens to know what college is going to be right for them as they grow into young adults.

If you can figure out how to arrange it, it might be helpful for your son to talk to some of the alumni of his soccer program about their college experiences, positive and negative. It also might be helpful for him to talk to students other than his older brother, period, to try to get a sense of what his life will be like in the next few years. If, after he does that, he is still sure that soccer is his number one priority, you should allow him to follow his wishes. Forcing him to apply to schools he doesn’t want to go to is likely to be counterproductive.

Part of parenthood is allowing kids to make their own mistakes, and the thing is, this might not even be a mistake. And if it does turn out to be one, it’s not irrevocable. If you use this process to establish your role in your son’s life as a provider of open communication and helpful guidance, you will be paving the way for a brighter future for your relationship, and for his independent decision-making as an adult.

— Emily

More Advice From Slate

A few years ago my now 11-year-old daughter found the “back massager” stowed under my bed. I told her that it was for massaging sore muscles and this is, indeed, the way this massager is marketed. In fact, I use it during sex with my husband and for masturbation. Recently, this back massager has been disappearing into my daughter’s room, where she says she uses it to massage her muscles. I just discovered she is also experimenting with it on her genitals. I don’t have any problem with her discovering her sexuality, but it seems awkward and inappropriate that she is using the instrument that I use. What should I do?

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An “Ex-Detranstioner” Disavows the Anti-Trans Movement She Helped Spark

This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.

Though the mainstream press—especially in the U.K., but not only there—often presents detransition as a deep, dark secret of the transgender community, the issue is actually pretty simple: Something like 1 percent to 3 percent of people who begin a gender transition ultimately decide it’s not for them, and they backtrack or travel elsewhere across the landscape of gender identity. It’s a straightforward question of individual needs, and no cause for alarm—at least not in the abstract.

However, in some cases, a person who once transitioned will turn against the concept of trans identity itself. These people form activist groups around the idea that “gender ideology” was the source of their confusion and pain. They call themselves “detransitioners,” and they advocate for limiting access to medical transition in the name of protecting others from making what they see as their mistakes. Detransitioners consider trans acceptance as something akin to a cult—and, as I can attest as a trans man and journalist who has tweeted critically of them before, they can respond with pronounced hostility toward anyone who questions their beliefs.

Now, some former members of this so-called detransition movement have themselves grown disillusioned with detransition orthodoxy and are starting to speak out. They report that, despite their efforts to change, they’re still trans. They want people to know that the detransitioned women’s movement couldn’t fix them—indeed, they never needed fixing in the first place.

They want people to know that the detransitioned women’s movement couldn’t fix them—indeed, they never needed fixing in the first place.

Ky Schevers is the most prominent of these apostates to date. She started to transition to male when she entered college, before later ending her transition. (She now again identifies as transmasculine—think more Elliot Page, less Chaz Bono—and uses she/her pronouns.) From 2013 to early 2020, Schevers published under the name CrashChaosCats, writing and vlogging regularly about her detransition and the beliefs that led her to it. She was interviewed for two major articles on detransition, both by cisgender female journalists: Rachel Monroe for the Outline in 2016, and Katie Herzog for the Stranger in 2017. Both pieces tell the story of Schevers identifying as male when she entered college, starting testosterone therapy soon after her mother’s death by suicide, and going off testosterone while still identifying as genderqueer. They end with her giving up her genderqueer identity and embracing the idea that not only her gender dysphoria but all gender dysphoria was false and caused by internalized sexism combined with trauma—an idea that she then did much to advance and proliferate online.

Today, however, Schevers has recanted this view. According to her, like the ex-gays of the 1990s and 2000s—many of whom claimed they “overcame” their sexuality after religious conversion, only to reaffirm it later—some detransitioned people still struggle in private against feelings of gender dysphoria that they can never fully suppress. “It’s very similar to ex-gay communities where there’s a story out there that people ‘change’ and it’s great and everything,” she told me. “No one really changes. They learn to keep their desires under control.”

Detransitioners may be a small group—even the highest estimates are in the hundreds, compared with an estimated number of transgender-identified people in the low millions—but they have been influential in pushing their denial that trans identity is real. Publicly, detransitioners disavow not only their individual transition histories but also the fact that transition helps trans people worldwide to live comfortably in their own skin. Although a few men also identify as detransitioned, most of the community congregates in sex-exclusive online forums for detransitioned women only. They believe gender dysphoria is common among women and disappears when they learn to love and accept their female bodies.

Detransitioned women have gained influence because of strong interest in their stories by both anti-trans activists and some journalists. In addition to being featured in countless horror stories aimed at frightening parents of gender-nonconforming youth and undermining trans people organizing for their rights, this influence translated to a major loss for trans rights in the U.K. last December, when Keira Bell, a detransitioned woman, successfully argued in court that doctors and parents of transgender youth were incapable of helping them to navigate decisions about transition-related treatment without court oversight.

The Bell case was what finally prompted Schevers to go public with her criticisms of the detransitioned women’s movement, despite being one of its founders. “It was Keira Bell in the U.K., and seeing how detransition can be used to dramatically affect trans people’s access to health care,” she said. “People give a certain weight to those [detransition] stories. We always tried to emphasize that there were a lot of us, but the gatherings that took place were not large. They never got more than 30 women, and not all of them were detransitioners.” She added, “Trans people deserve access to support, and it makes no sense to shut down people’s access to medical transition just because some people end up detransitioning.”

At 35, Schevers is no longer saying she was wrong about everything, either in her transition or her detransition. She now identifies as “a transmasculine butch dyke, genderqueer, something like that,” she told me, and her she/her pronouns contrast with her male-sounding voice and masculine presentation. She doesn’t think that every single detransitioned woman is really trans, and understands that others may have different experiences. Schevers believes strongly that every person deserves the right to question their gender identity and find their own paths.

She recognizes the good in her detransition experience, explaining: “There’s not always space in trans and queer communities for transmasculine people to talk about internalized misogyny. I could talk about it openly without worrying that people were going to be upset by it.” She even sees the good in some of the ideology, which is based in radical feminist ideas about internalized misogyny and male violence. “Not all the radical feminist ideas were terrible either: I learned a lot about women’s history,” Schevers said. “A lot of what I read was pretty interesting, so I’m glad that I explored that stuff.”

Still, as the detransition community Schevers helped spark grew, its repressive and transphobic sides eventually became too much to ignore. Schevers also found her gender dysphoria, which she once thought had disappeared for good, began to come back strongly over time. “My sense of being a woman unraveled, and I was feeling more like a dude or a gender weirdo,” she recalled. “But I was fighting against these feelings because I’d built a life in the detransition community, and I knew a lot of the other women in the community wouldn’t be happy with it if I came out as trans. I tried to explain it in a radical feminist framework, and find the root causes, and do everything to make these feelings go away, and that didn’t really work. The only thing that did work to make them go away was accepting them. I had to make a move to accept them.”

As the detransition community Schevers helped spark grew, its repressive and transphobic sides eventually became too much to ignore.

A second ex-member of the detransitioned women’s community, whom I’ll call Max, confirmed Schevers’ characterizations. Max (who identifies as transmasculine and asked to use she/her pronouns “for now”) requested to use a pseudonym and that this article avoid identifying details, because she’s fearful of the harassment that detransitioned women—and their anti-trans allies—direct against trans people who disagree with them.

Schevers and Max don’t know each other. While Schevers was becoming disillusioned and distancing herself from detransition circles, Max (in her early 20s) was beginning to explore detransition. She said she would watch Schevers’ detransition videos “obsessively.” Later, Max watched the negative response to Schevers leaving the community with discomfort.

Unlike Schevers, Max was never a prominent detransitioner, although for a time her social media accounts attracted a following from detransitioners and anti-trans activists. Like Schevers, Max feels some insights gleaned from her time in the detransitioned women’s community were worthwhile, particularly about the misogyny in the transmasculine community and learning to grapple with the feeling that there was no place to freely express doubts, fears, or regrets as a trans person. As a person of color, Max also has strong criticisms of how trans peers responded to her nonwhiteness, and of racism in the trans community at large.

After coming out and beginning medical transition in college, Max had doubts that were exacerbated by complications from her treatment. She began reading and posting in online forums dedicated to detransition and eventually asked her friends and family to return to using she/her pronouns for her. She still feels she transitioned much too quickly and thinks poorly of the therapist she saw during her transition. However, it didn’t take long before hateful attitudes toward trans people and widespread pressure not to retransition in the community began to trouble her.

“I was feeling really confused about my gender and really frustrated about it, and frustrated with having to go on testosterone,” Max said. “I thought, maybe I wouldn’t need testosterone by immersing myself in that community. But I realized, ‘I still want T—but I really feel like I shouldn’t.’ Why did I feel like I shouldn’t? I felt like I shouldn’t because I’d been gulping down TERF rhetoric,” she said, referring to the beliefs of trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

Asked why she wanted to speak up, Max offered up her harshest criticisms of the movement: “I guess the biggest thing for me was realizing I was taken advantage of. I was very recently trans and very recently detrans, and people basically used my experiences as ammunition against trans people. I let it slide, for a while, because I was so used to being ignored and even ostracized by the trans community.”

In talking to former and current members of the detrans community, I also spoke with people who described their experiences differently. Not everyone who detransitions experiences dysphoria again or holds transphobic views, emphasized one detransitioned 18-year-old from the U.K. “I’d like people to know that detrans women genuinely possess a variety of viewpoints, and painting us all with the same brush doesn’t help anyone,” she said. This young woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said transition may help dysphoria for some people and that she doesn’t take issue with trans women using women’s restrooms. She also believes that every study that shows medical transition is widely effective has major flaws, and that her own gender dysphoria stemmed from internalized misogyny. She said confronting those misogynistic attitudes has reduced her own gender dysphoria a great deal.

Because of her very visible and central role in the detrans community, Schevers takes a lot of the responsibility for its most toxic aspects. Schevers is clear that she now believes she, and others in the community, hurt trans people by telling them their dysphoria was internalized misogyny that would go away if they loved themselves enough. The detrans community, with her as a participant, also hurt trans people by allying with extreme anti-trans activists and giving them political ammunition against trans people, making detransition stories a central feature of anti-trans fearmongering and supporting activism aimed at limiting access to medical transition.

Schevers hopes that by putting her real name on this story and describing the patterns she helped perpetuate, her words will ring true, despite her history of saying very different things than what she says now. One such pattern is treating the desire to transition as if it were a drug addiction—a persistent impulse to be guarded against throughout a formerly transitioned person’s life. Schevers shared evidence of language detransitioned women had plucked from self-help groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, applied to the ongoing desire to appear male—terms like triggers and phrases like we commit that are instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with the language of 12-step programs. Not incidentally, this is exactly how many in the ex-gay movement view persistent romantic desires for members of the same sex.

Contrary to these methods, the goal of transition is not to temporarily stave off gender dysphoria, treating it as a lifelong struggle against “triggers,” but instead to drastically reduce or eliminate such feelings, permanently. Numerous studies, representing an overwhelming medical consensus, support this approach. Thousands of trans people, including this reporter, can testify to the relief transition provides. Regret is rare—far rarer than the regret rates of other comparable treatments. This does not mean transition works for every single patient. No treatment can claim 100 percent success, and people with doubts and regrets about transition are real and deserve safe, affirming spaces to discuss these feelings. It does mean that transition is an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, transition—and not any amount of radical feminist ideology, self-help, or anti-trans paternalism—is the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria that currently exists.

The ex-gay movement is much diminished (though far from gone) these days, after many of its leaders have publicly come out as gay and admitted that, as hard as they prayed, the gayness never truly went away. Schevers and Max’s stories are an early sign that, in time, the “detransition movement” may be destined for the same ignoble fate.

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Why You Aren’t Actually Losing Something by Reading Books in Translation

On this week’s episode of Working, Rumaan Alam spoke with translator and writer Damion Searls. They discussed Searls’ process for approaching his projects; why a translator doesn’t necessarily have to be fluent in a language to translate from it; and what it takes to capture a book’s style, idioms, and nuances in another language. This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rumaan Alam: You translated a novel called Sundays in August by one of my absolute favorite living writers, the French Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. I personally don’t have any language other than English, and I feel like there are these purists who will say, “No, you haven’t really read Modiano because you’ve only experienced him in translation.” His body of work is so big that it has multiple translators, because English publishers have been trying to catch up after Modiano won the Nobel Prize. I’ve read your translation of this book, and I’ve read a handful of his other translators in his other books. Am I getting Modiano, or am I getting a simulacrum of Modiano?

Damion Searls: I think that’s an overdefensive reaction to some sort of insecurity that’s been instilled in you by this kind of technical vision of, is it 99.7 percent accurate or is it 99.8 percent accurate? Why wouldn’t you be getting Modiano? There is a different layer when you read someone who wrote in English. They’ve been edited, and somebody put a certain cover on it, and they’ve been reviewed in a certain way, and they exist in the culture in a certain way. You’re either reading it in a course where the professor’s framing it a certain way, or you’re not. The bookstores decided to stock it and promote it in a certain way, so you’re not in some pure, ideal mind-meld with the author, either. The best analogy would be performing music. If you listen to Glenn Gould, are you listening to Bach or not?

That is a really tough question.

There’s no real answer, right? The answer is both. You’re listening to Bach as good as you can ever listen to Bach. There’s no better way, unless you just read the score, but maybe that’s the worst way. On the other hand, Glenn Gould is not going to be playing it the same way everyone else will be playing it. So if you have 10 different recordings of the same piece, you’re listening to Bach in 10 different ways, but you’re not not listening to him. That’s what I would say about the Modiano: How could you better read Modiano?

Go back in time and be born in 1929, I suppose. But I can’t think of another way, really. How do you evaluate a translation? Especially with a writer like Modiano who has multiple translators. I hear people say this all the time, “Did you like that translation? Did you like this new book?” I don’t really have a perspective on it because obviously I’m reading the language and thinking about the way it’s working, but I’m understanding that as the choice made by the author and not the translator, even if it is something that’s happening as a duet, without my realizing it.

That’s another one of those mysterious questions, right? Because I feel like I can judge translations, even if I don’t know the original text, even if I don’t know the original language. You can sense: Is this an artistically motivated stretch of the language, or is this some weird defamation of the language, where it just doesn’t sound right, like people wouldn’t say that?

Translations from different languages tend to go wrong in ways specific to the languages. For example, translations from Spanish might sound really flowery, because Spanish has a Latinate vocabulary and Latinate words are flowery in English, even though they’re not in Spanish—they’re just the words. Translations of Chinese poetry can sound foggy because they have a different grammar. You can just tell if this hasn’t clicked. So I would encourage you to let go of this inner schoolmarm who’s telling you that you don’t have the right to judge a translation. If it’s a book you like, then it works. It’s good. If it’s something that you’re bored and confused by, then it didn’t work. It’s true you may not 100 percent know, was it the author or the translator? A bad translator can actually make you think that the author is bad without meaning to. But you don’t have to feel, “I’m not able to judge a translation because I haven’t got this or that skill.” Why not? You judge every book you read.

To listen to the full interview with Damion Searls, subscribe to Working on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or listen below.

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This Bill Has Experts Worried the Pennsylvania GOP Could Gerrymander Judicial Districts

This article was originally published by Spotlight PA and Votebeat, a project focused on local election integrity and voting access.

HARRISBURG — A proposal moving through the GOP-led Pennsylvania legislature could soon make the state an extreme outlier in the country by allowing lawmakers to exert more control over the state Supreme Court and other appellate courts.

The measure, which could be before voters as soon as May, calls for abolishing statewide elections for appellate court judges and replacing them with races in partisan districts determined by lawmakers and redrawn every 10 years.

A 50-state review by Spotlight PA and Votebeat, as well as interviews with judicial and academic experts, found only two other states — Illinois and Louisiana — employ such a system, which has increased partisan campaign fights and given special interests and dark money groups more of a foothold to affect the outcome of races.

Experts said the change in Pennsylvania could risk the public’s confidence in judges because they wouldn’t answer to a statewide constituency, but rather smaller, localized districts that are more politically homogeneous. That, in turn, could affect how they rule, eroding the judiciary’s independence and making it appear more political.

“The underlying assumption [of this proposal] is that judicial rulings, decisions, and the conduct of the judiciary should reflect some kind of partisan or ideological majority,” said Kent Redfield, a political science professor at the University of Illinois Springfield. “It’s antithetical to how judges should rule.”

The proposal — championed by Rep. Russ Diamond (R., Lebanon), a far-right member of the state legislature — most closely resembles the system in Illinois. With its partisan districts, the state has seen millions of dollars in dark money pumped into contentious — even fraudulent — elections as special interests vie for control of the highest court.

“All of those create circumstances under which one can introduce bias or create a situation where you have the appearance of bias,” Redfield said. “That’s not good for the health of the democratic institutions.”

Diamond and other Republicans contend electing appellate judges by districts rather than in statewide partisan contests — as is currently the process — will ensure that the state Supreme Court, Superior Court, and Commonwealth Court reflect the state’s diverse geography, and therefore its diverse judicial philosophies.

Currently, the majority of the 31 appellate court judges hail from the state’s two largest and most Democratic urban centers, Allegheny County and Philadelphia.

“We draft legislation to solve Pennsylvania’s problems, and I do not know whether any other states suffer with this particular problem,” Diamond said in an email.

Critics — including a wide array of legal organizations and good-government groups — call the measure a ploy for Republicans to gain more control over the Supreme Court, where Democrats in the majority have recently ruled against the GOP in election- and pandemic-related litigation.

Under Diamond’s proposal, which he has filed in every legislative session since 2015, lawmakers would redraw judicial districts every 10 years, as they do for congressional districts. The judicial maps would have to adhere to the same redistricting criteria outlined in the Pennsylvania Constitution, which requires lawmakers to draw districts that are roughly equal in population, compact, and contiguous, as well as avoid splitting localities “unless absolutely necessary.”

Despite those requirements, Pennsylvania lawmakers — who would be in charge of drawing the three appellate court maps — produced one of the most gerrymandered congressional maps in the country, which the state Supreme Court threw out in 2018.

Since the judicial districts would be established by law, the maps would require approval from the governor, according to Diamond.

“I envision input from the courts as well in the negotiations to establish that plan, which would bring all three branches of government together at a time when the commonwealth desperately needs such cooperation,” he said.

The manner of selecting judges has been highly debated across the country for decades, with states taking different approaches to appointing judges through merit selection or electing them either through partisan or nonpartisan races.

Twenty-eight states pick their Supreme Court justices through some combination of a commission that recommends candidates based on merit to the governor or legislature for appointment, at least for an initial term on the bench, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Six states, including Pennsylvania, hold partisan elections, and 15 hold nonpartisan elections, with one state — New Mexico — requiring justices to run in partisan elections after being appointed by the governor.

Four states — Mississippi, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Illinois — elect Supreme Court justices by district. The two states that most closely resemble Diamond’s proposal, Illinois and Louisiana, hold partisan district elections, but the lines have remained untouched for decades.

In Illinois, three of the seven Supreme Court justices are elected from Cook County — home to the heavily Democratic county seat of Chicago — and the rest are elected from districts that are supposed to be equal in population. But those districts haven’t been redrawn since 1963, resulting in uneven populations as residents have moved.

After 10 years on the bench, Illinois Supreme Court judges are subject to uncontested retention elections within their districts for additional 10-year terms, like Diamond is proposing for Pennsylvania.

In 2004, two judicial candidates spent at least $8.9 million on their campaigns in Illinois’ southern swing district. Court filings later revealed that the campaign of the winning candidate, Lloyd Karmeier, was secretly funded in part by State Farm in a bid to get a billion-dollar verdict against the company overturned.

In 2020, Republicans spent millions of dollars to prevent Illinois Supreme Court Justice Thomas Kilbride, a Democrat and the swing vote on the court, from being retained for another 10 years. Kilbride was the first justice in the state to lose a retention bid since the practice was first adopted in 1964, according to media reports. 

In Louisiana, Supreme Court justices are elected to staggered 10-year terms from seven districts that haven’t been redrawn since 2000. All candidates compete in the same primary, and if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters advance to the general election.

New England Law professor Jordan Singer said having partisan elections in small geographic districts invites more campaign “mischief” than in a statewide race, because special interests are able to target their audience more narrowly, and there are fewer media markets to consider.

“It really opens the door for special interests and dark money to say, ‘Look, we can get a lot of bang for our buck by pouring money into this small region of the state, getting our candidate elected, and then that candidate will hopefully advance our interests,’” he said.

New England Law professor Jordan Singer said having partisan elections in small geographic districts invites more campaign “mischief” than in a statewide race.

That’s not to say outsized spending doesn’t occur in statewide partisan races. Topping the spending in Illinois’ 2004 Supreme Court race was Pennsylvania’s 2015 contest, where candidates vying for three seats spent a combined $15.9 million, according to the Brennan Center.

Chris Bonneau, a political science professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said candidates win by larger margins in judicial districts, and there are fewer contested races because the districts are more politically homogeneous.

Redfield said district elections would probably produce few candidates that reflect the partisan or ideological “middle,” and more who win by running to the extreme left or right of their base, especially if the districts aren’t competitive.

He said introducing ideological advantages, such as redistricting, into judicial elections causes people to perceive judges as partisan actors who are beholden to constituencies, rather than as impartial judges who are impervious to outside influences.

“Redistricting becomes a way to make sure that the districts do not unfairly represent the interest of people, implicitly accepting the premise that judges represent people, not the law and the Constitution,” he said.

The Pennsylvania Constitution requires amendments to pass in the legislature twice in consecutive sessions before being placed on the ballot. After being approved by the General Assembly last year, Diamond’s measure narrowly passed a House committee earlier this month, with two Republicans siding with Democrats in voting against it.

If both chambers pass the measure by Feb. 17, the amendment would appear on the ballot for the May 18 primary. Its next step is a vote on the House floor, though Diamond said Tuesday he does not know when leadership plans to bring the measure up for a vote. A spokesperson for House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff (R., Centre) did not respond to a request for comment.

Jane Cutler Greenspan, a retired Democratic Supreme Court justice from Philadelphia appointed by Gov. Ed Rendell, said she thought about rural counties that weren’t like her home base when she made decisions that impacted the entire state.

Greenspan, who opposes Diamond’s constitutional amendment, said that wouldn’t necessarily be the case if she had been elected by a district.

“If I was just beholden to the electorate in Philadelphia, that’s pretty much where I would vote,” she said. “You’ll have justices not considering other districts.”

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Studio Ghibli’s First Fully Computer-Animated Movie Feels like the End of an Era

Perhaps the most infamous clip of Hayao Miyazaki—the Studio Ghibli co-founder whose name remains synonymous with the studio’s work—is of his reaction to a CGI animation demo: “I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all,” the animation master says. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” The context alters his meaning a little—the animators have presented a model of a zombie whose movements they describe as grotesque, to which Miyazaki takes offense given his friendship with someone whose physical disability is so severe that he finds even giving a high-five to be difficult—but Miyazaki’s strong words (he reduces the animators to tears) and his declaration, later, that the animators’ desire to build a machine capable of creating art feels like a sign of the end times make a total pivot to computer animation for Studio Ghibli seem unthinkable. Which is why the existence of the studio’s latest film, the completely computer-animated Earwig and the Witch, is so bizarre.

Based on the novel of the same name by Diana Wynne Jones and directed by Hayao Miyazaki’s son Gorō, Earwig feels curiously empty. The character designs are wonderfully distinct and colorful, but the world around them—and the way that they move through it—comes across as flat despite being animated in 3D. In a press conference for the film, Gorō joked that he made the anime with a young staff and “didn’t consult with any of the old guys at all,” saying that the elder Miyazaki had given him the green light and had then been hands off. (Hayao Miyazaki is credited as a planner on the film.) Unfortunately for Gorō, who already has impossible shoes to fill, the lack of his father’s touch is evident.

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The movie’s setup is simple and plenty reminiscent of Ghibli classics. As a baby, Earwig (Kokoro Hirasawa) was left on the doorstep of an orphanage, and in the decade that has passed since, she’s come to like it so much that when she’s finally adopted by a rather strange couple, she begs the orphanage matron not to let her go. However, when she discovers that her new mother, Bella Yaga (Shinobu Terajima), is a witch, her attitude changes, and she eagerly volunteers to become Bella Yaga’s apprentice. Bella Yaga, however, has other plans. Earwig is tasked with completing menial tasks around the house rather than learning any magic and warned away from disturbing the house’s other occupant, the mysterious Mandrake (Etsushi Toyokawa), a man with ears so long that, as Earwig notes, they resemble horns.

Unfortunately for Gorō Miyazaki, who already has impossible shoes to fill, the lack of his father’s touch is evident.

The script, written by Keiko Niwa and Emi Gunji, has only one question in mind: Will Earwig and Bella Yaga ever learn to get along? There are tantalizing breadcrumbs scattered here and there that hint at the larger world in which Earwig and the Witch takes place, but the scope of the film itself is frustratingly small, to the point that it feels like a TV pilot rather than a film. (To that end, it’s also the first and only Ghibli film to end on a note that feels like a cliffhanger, or at least leaves the door open for a sequel.) That sense of diminished scale is exacerbated by the visuals, which come across as sparse, as if there simply wasn’t enough time to render all of the objects that would normally populate the vivid worlds that Studio Ghibli films are known for. In a street scene, for instance, all of the cars that go by are the same boxy model, just painted different colors.

Gorō is a talented director. The individual shots of Earwig are beautifully composed, the characters are delightful (the tiny demons who wait upon Mandrake seem destined to become merchandise hits), and the film’s flimsy plot isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the visuals sink the entire enterprise. Studio Ghibli has used computer animation in its films before—e.g., the Stink Spirit’s transformation in Spirited Away—but it has only been in moments, and in service of otherwise 2D films, rather than in such a wholesale fashion. The uncannily smooth nature of Earwig—characters’ skin and hair appear waxy at best—only emphasizes the point that CG animation is a new frontier for the studio, and the extent that it pales in comparison to the cutting-edge work done by Pixar. Earwig may be much smaller—it’s technically a TV movie—but that knowledge doesn’t make the experience of watching it any less jarring.

It’s curious to watch, in comparison, Hayao Miyazaki’s single venture in animating solely in CG, the short film Boro the Caterpillar. The short is only available to watch in its entirety at the Ghibli Museum, but the few glimpses of it that are available make it clear that the computer graphics are being used to replicate 2D animation rather than Earwig-esque 3D. Though Studio Ghibli’s one TV series, the Gorō-helmed Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter, attempts an approach that’s halfway between both worlds through cel shading, a single look makes it clear that it suffers the same problems that Earwig does in terms of its characters appearing somewhat weightless and disconnected from the world. At any rate, pushing the studio further into 3D territory doesn’t truly seem to be in the cards so long as the 80-year-old Hayao is around, as his current project, the forthcoming movie How Do You Live?, is being hand-drawn.

There are a few moments in Earwig that manage to transcend the awkward animation, but nothing that really makes the case for the movie being in 3D. Pixar, and studios like Laika and Cartoon Saloon, which resolutely work in stop-motion and hand-drawn animation respectively, have developed distinct styles that are inseparable from their mediums. Earwig’s designs don’t separate it from the rest of the Ghibli pack, which is both a blessing and a curse: The recognizable Ghibli style will attract viewers but also makes Earwig feel like a dull copy. The brief, bright pop of hand-drawn animation (or at least the approximation of it) in the film’s opening credits only makes it clearer that, at this stage, using 3D CG animation isn’t opening a door for Studio Ghibli. It’s closing one.

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