That remarkable fact may be related to the third reason, which is that for the first time in America, there is the practical possibility of passing English over. In the old days, when American immigrants came in small clumps from many lands, each group had to sink or swim, language-wise. Today, there is a critical enough mass of immigrants from one language—Spanish—that the possibility of staying comfortable in your native-born tongue is higher. Low-wage workers in particular can work, shop, and socialize entirely in Spanish, and there is a good chance their children can get by in school without speaking much English, either. Throw in Univision, Telemundo, CNN en Español, and People en Español, and English can seem downright unnecessary.

  You can see this attitude emerging if you scrutinize the data on Latinos and English. While it is true that Latinos display near-universal support for teaching English to the children of immigrants, and majorities of Latinos across every income, education, and political group say that “immigrants need to speak English to be part of American society,” there is a sizable, and arguably growing, minority that disagrees.

  According to a 2006 survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, over 4 in 10 Latino immigrants say that immigrants do not need to speak English to be part of American society. Of native-born Latinos, the percentage who feel that way is even higher, at 46 percent.

  And even more tellingly, among young Latinos, less than half think that immigrants need to speak English to be part of American society. Whereas 69 percent of older Latinos say that immigrants need English to be part of America, only 48 percent of Latinos aged 18–29 do. Now it is possible that in answering that question, younger respondents felt defensive about their parents and grandparents who don’t speak English but who nonetheless have contributed mightily to American society. They might not have been referring to their own circumstances in saying that English isn’t core to being American. But combined with the Census numbers about American-born heads of linguistically isolated households—this could be a trend to watch.

  The old cliché was that second-generation Americans served as their parents’ navigators, leaping at all the opportunities of the New World, but there may be a small group of second-generation immigrants today who would rather stay tied to the old country.

  What are the implications?

  Some are gloomy. According to the U.S. Department of Education, people with limited English are less likely to be employed, less likely to be employed continuously, and more likely to work in the least desirable sectors. And their earning potential reflects it. According to Census data, linguistically isolated households are ten times more likely to have incomes under $15,000 than over $100,000.

  Non-English-Speakers are also an increasing challenge for hospitals—63 percent of which report seeing patients with limited English proficiency either daily or weekly (and for large hospitals, it’s 96 percent). With no systematic way to translate, hospitals end up dispensing worse primary care and overusing expensive diagnostic tests and emergency care.

  Others see a silver lining—like in the fact that the Spanish-speaking market is taking off like never before. Spanish-language TV dwarfs English channels in several major American cities. And while Spanish-language radio has topped ratings in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and New York for nearly ten years—as of 2005, it is also beating English-language stations in smaller markets like Dallas, Phoenix, and San Diego. And it is growing increasingly popular in places like Des Moines, Tulsa, and Omaha.

  So with something like $700 billion in Latino purchasing power in the U.S., many U.S. companies are leaving the assimilation debates to the sociologists and just advertising in Spanish. In the early 2000s, when most companies were cutting their overall advertising budgets, many were maintaining or even increasing their Spanish-language share.

  As a matter of policy, if Americans want to close the language gap, we should commit to providing English education to everyone who wants it. At the moment, state support for English lessons is pretty haphazard—Texas, with the third highest immigration rate in the country, spends the minimum required by the federal government, while Connecticut, with its middling immigration rate, spends seven times that. And beyond just numbers of classes, we will likely need to come up with creative, flexible ways to teach English, since many immigrants have low educational backgrounds to start with, are working multiple jobs, working odd hours, and raising children.

  And speaking of children, we are squandering a big chance if we don’t focus on language support for immigrant youth, since one’s foreign language ability apparently falls off precipitously after age 12. (That immigration opponents want to deny public education to the children of illegal immigrants seems particularly ironic in this regard.)

  But most importantly, let’s get over the melting pot myth. The truth is we’re more like a Tower of Babel, doing remarkably well at communicating given the fact that U.S. residents today speak over 300 languages. (And who says that’s a lot? It’s about the same number as was true at America’s founding, and we now have sixty times more people.) The bottom line is that so long as we’re understanding each other—and no one (not even President Bush, who criticized it) misunderstood “The Star-Spangled Banner” when it was sung in Spanish at the 2006 immigration rallies—then we’re doing pretty well.

  Vive la différence.

  Unisexuals

  Since the feminist revolution of the 1970s, we’ve seen plenty of men doing “women’s jobs,” and women doing “men’s jobs.” Male nurses have more than doubled since the early 1980s. So have male au pairs, just since 2001. On the other side, there are sixteen women in the U.S. Senate as of 2007—sixteen times as many as there were in 1981. Since 1972, women in active-duty troops have increased from 2 to 14 percent.

  Beyond this kind of “gender-bending” at work, we’ve also heard a lot lately about “metrosexuals”—heterosexual men who buy their own (fashionable) clothes; use cologne, body wash, and skin care treatments; and even get pedicures, waxing, and cosmetic surgery. And of course, women who play lacrosse, drive race cars, and lift weights competitively.

  But today in America, there is a growing number of people who don’t just “cross the gender line” when it comes to jobs and hobbies—they reject the very line itself. To them, the binary gender classification system is arbitrary, limiting, and even oppressive. It fails to account for the gray area between male and female that they say more accurately describes them, and arguably everyone else, too.

  Some of them want to do away with baggage-laden words like “boy” and “girl,” and start again with “boi” and “grrl,” and maybe “ze” in place of he and she, or “hir” in place of him and her.

  The names for this group are evolving as fast as the movement. Unisexual is one. So is “pomosexual,” for “postmodern.” “Genderqueer.” “Gender-fluid.” Within the black community, they are “transsistahs” and “transbrothas.” Within the Native American community, they are “Two Spirits”—a group that was traditionally accorded special respect. Old-fashioned, Latinate types may still be good with “androgynous,” or “hermaphrodite.”

  The most general term is “transgender,” which refers to people whose biological sex (the one they were born with) does not match their gender identity (their “inner sense” of being male or female). They are the “T” in what has become the fairly mainstream “LGBT” label, joining them with lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals.

  The transgender umbrella includes:

  Transsexuals, who have had sex change operations and/or take opposite-sex hormones.

  The “intersex”—the 1 out of every 4,500 or so children who are born with ambiguous sex organs. (Jeffrey Eugenides’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Middlesex, was about one such person.)

  Children as young as 5 who display strong predispositions to dress like the opposite gender—and who are triggering a large, new tolerance movement in schools and communities.

  Those who, for a host of personal, political, and/or aesthetic reasons, simply reject the male/female classification.

  No one is absolutely sure how many transgender people there are. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health estimates that about 1 in 12,000 males and about 1 in 30,000 females are transgender—which translates into about 17,500 such people in America.

  Still, their profile is growing. In 2005, Desperate Housewives’ star Felicity Huffman played the lead in the Oscar-nominated Transamerica, a film featuring a man who was becoming a woman, who learns that s/he has a runaway son. In the same year, the Sundance Channel produced TransGeneration, a documentary with the tagline “Four College Students Switching More Than Their Majors.” In 2006, All My Children became the first American daytime drama to feature a transgender coming-out plotline—with Zarf, a showy rock star played by Jeffrey Carlson, announcing to his friend Bianca that he is actually Zoe, the woman he has felt himself to be all along.

  But for such a small group, transgenders’ clout is remarkable. Up from zero in 1995, there are now seventy-four colleges and universities—including Ivy League schools, public universities, historically black colleges, and community colleges—that ban discrimination not only on the basis of gender and sexual orientation, but also on the basis of gender identity and expression. That’s over 1 million college students in America now protected from a form of discrimination that, a decade ago, essentially no one had ever heard of.

  Fourteen colleges and universities—including Duke, California State Polytechnic, Tufts, and Antioch—have changed all their official student forms to allow students to check “male,” “female,” or “self-identify.”

  In 2006, the University of Arizona announced that students were allowed to use whichever restrooms on campus corresponded to their gender identity. The Los Angeles Unified School District requires that students be addressed with “a name and pronoun that corresponds to the gender identity.”

  The newest front in education is “gender-blind” housing, which translates into coed rooming. Ever since higher ed went coed in the 1960s and 1970s, the one thing you could be sure of was having a roommate of your own sex. No more. In 2003, Wesleyan University was the first campus to affirmatively allow coed rooming; since then, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and several others have followed suit. Think Will & Grace. Now two best friends, a gay man and a straight woman, can be college roommates. (You might think heterosexual couples would be racing to sneak in under these provisions, but so far, they’re not. Apparently the year’s housing commitment is longer than most college couples are ready to embrace.)

  Transgender issues have gone beyond schools and campuses and into the workplace and state legislatures. Over 100 major corporations, including ChevronTexaco, Ernst & Young, and Merrill Lynch, have added gender identity to their nondiscrimination policies. Eight states, plus a host of municipalities that together cover over 30 percent of Americans, ban gender identity discrimination. In December 2006, New York City stopped just short of adopting a policy that would allow people to change the sex noted on their birth certificates, even if they hadn’t had a sex change operation.

  In 2004, the International Olympics Committee ruled that transsexuals can compete as their new gender, so long as it’s been at least two years since their surgery.

  While such Unisexuals are few, some say they’re the next wave of the civil rights movement. How long before the U.S. Census, too, has a third-sex category beyond male and female—much like in 2000 when it allowed us to check “multiple” races? How long before it’s considered impolite, or illegal, to ask a child’s gender on an application for school?

  Will we stop separating men and women in the military, in public rest-rooms, in hospital rooms, in prisons, and in the clothing departments at Wal-Mart?

  Will there be a Boys and Girls—and Other—Club of America?

  Anecdotes aside, Unisexuals are the extreme version of a trend that has become increasingly comfortable for years. Sure, only a few people take opposite-sex hormones, or dress up in their spouse’s clothes, but since the 1970s there has been a substantial blurring of the line between “male” and “female” in terms of habits, tastes, and fashions. And the marketers are picking up on it. Designer house Blue Cult has just come out with a brand of jeans that fits both men and women. Mainstream fragrance-makers like Calvin Klein and The Gap sell shared fragrances, or “uniscents.” The current rage is “Boyfriend Jeans”—lower rise, tight around the rear, but more relaxed in the legs.

  Unisex names—like Cameron, Hayden, Madison, and Quinn—are popular again in ways we haven’t seen in centuries.

  To my mind, the key reason Unisexuals are interesting is not so much that they blur gender lines—gender-bending has been around, of course, since Hermes and Aphrodite were joined in a word. What’s so interesting to me about Unisexuals is that they may be the ideological heirs of the feminist—and revolutionary—principle that biology need not be destiny. Today’s young women don’t actively carry this mantle: Some of them think “feminism” means “un-feminine,” and young female professionals long ago rejected the boxy blue suits their mothers wore to work in favor of belly shirts and leopard-print sling-backs. But the transgender population, along with its remarkable number of allies, has reseized this idea, readvancing the principle that identity is less about one’s DNA than about one’s inner being.

  Public policymakers, architects, and fashion leaders beware—it ain’t so simple as boys and girls anymore.

  PART X

  Money and Class

  Second-Home Buyers

  Second homes” in America bring to mind lavish beach houses, or vast Texas ranches.

  Second-home buyers, it would seem, have money to burn, an awful lot of leisure time, and a hankering for opulence in not just one residence but two. Exclusive Resorts has even made a new business of luxury second-home timesharing, requiring a quarter of a million dollars as the price of entry.

  But the truth is, middle-income people are the fastest-growing group of second-home buyers. Sales of second homes soared in 2005, accounting for a record-breaking 40 percent of all residential housing sales. And it wasn’t because Oprah Winfrey needed another multimillion-dollar townhouse in Aspen or because the Kennedys got another “compound.” According to the National Association of Realtors 2005 report, the typical vacation-home buyer earns just $71,000. The median income of investment-home-buyers is $85,700. The median purchase price of second homes is under $200,000.

  Second homes are a middle-class craze.

  How did this happen? First of all, second-home buying got easier in 1997, when Congress created a tax break for two-home owners who sell their primary residence. Middle-class empty-nesters (the core of the baby boomers) can now cash out their family homes and buy two smaller homes instead.

  Second, for many Americans, 9/11 raised the allure of a remote home where people can truly retreat, or hide if necessary.

  Third, as the stock market got less reliable, real estate began looking pretty good. Of the 3.34 million second homes purchased in 2005, 2 million of these were investments.

  Fourth, people began buying second homes for work—either because their major clients were far away; because they were cultivating clients in multiple places; or because their spouses were already settled in a different city. Whereas couples used to pick up and move if one of them got a job in a new city, it is now estimated that over 1.5 million couples maintain two residences in order to preserve both jobs.

  And of course technology has made it possible for people to work from multiple sites—with a laptop, a cell phone, and a BlackBerry, one can keep in touch with one’s clients (and employees, and bosses) from one’s woodsy porch as easily as from one’s cube.

  But perhaps the biggest reason people are buying second homes is family. Whether it’s the Florida couple who buys a condo in Philadelphia so they can easily visit their son at Penn; or the grandparents in Chicago who buy a Savannah home so they can gather their grandkids from Houston, Asheville, and Miami on weekends—family seems to be a driving force behind the surge in middle-class second homes. In a 2005 survey of two-home owners, a plurality said their main goal in life was family happiness/being a successful parent; and an equally large plurality said that the biggest crisis facing America at that time was the dissolution of family. (That was nearly double the number who said the biggest crisis facing America was terrorism, or the war in Iraq.)

  Living in second homes has become so widespread that a new term has developed for people who regularly go back and forth: Splitters.

  According to www.splitters.com (created by WCI Communities, a homebuilding company), Splitters are “people who own at least two homes and split their time between them for recreation, work-life balance, or to connect with family and friends.” Whereas snowbirds shift residences once or twice a year at most, Splitters go back and forth five times a year on average, and some go as often as several times a month.

  There are even Super-Splitters—people who divide their time among three or more homes. But before you think Oprah and the Kennedys again, note that in the National Association of Realtors study, one-third of current second-home-buyers said they were very likely to purchase another home, in addition to the ones they currently owned, within the next two years—giving new meaning to the phrase “Bet you can’t eat just one.”

  This is creating not only a rising market for vacation-home builders, and furniture companies, but also great growth potential for the second homes’ local economies. Most people savoring family/getaway time will pay local workers to cut their grass, clean their houses, and check on the properties while they’re away. According to the WCI Communities’ survey, Splitters pay far more into their new communities than they take out—they don’t use the schools, but they do buy phone, cable, satellite TV, and local recreational attractions, and they spend close to $2,000 per year on home repairs, upgrades, and remodeling.