I don’t write about my transgender daughter much—not because she is a secret, but because she just mostly wants to live her life. She just started graduate school after earning two separate bachelor’s degrees, and she stays busy. We’re very proud of her.
She and I do, however, have an ongoing, necessary discussion about the dangers brought onto her daily by a hateful, authoritarian presidential administration and its millions of lockstep sycophants, fueled by ignorance, rage, prejudice, and a near-complete dearth of critical thinking.
I once had a more gracious breakdown of those characteristics than I do now. However, I’ve had to face a cruel reality. There are now too many people of my long personal acquaintance who have demonstrated their indifference to or active support of the ongoing attempted systematic destruction of transgender people for me to extend much charity in assessing their motivations.
Now in this paragraph I’d like to write something to those people about how they can begin extricating themselves from the dangerous echo chambers that continue to reinforce their destructive views, or how they can better understand what transgenderism is and is not, or how to make peace with longstanding misconceptions, including those rooted in faith traditions.
But there’s no point. No one reads anything like the above and feels seen.
The people who don’t see it in themselves include everyone who shrugs it off as a “political difference.” I do know some smile and pat me on the head, and then either don’t know or don’t care that I know what they say when they’re not in my presence. I also know that all of the “happy warrior” I have to spend on this going forward must be embodied in my work for Free Mom Hugs. I try to approach any difficulty with that mentality, but demonstrably it hasn’t worked out for me for this problem in any larger sense, and I can’t emotionally budget for that disappointment anymore.
My daughter will be in an academic environment for at least two more years. Admittedly selfishly, I am so thankful for that. (Even in the Deep South, and despite our esteemed president’s best efforts, a university tends to remain a place of enlightened thinking and sincere exchange of ideas.) Perhaps my perception of less short-term danger for her is illusory. Whatever the case, it’s certainly not a panacea, and obviously it’s nothing for many who have no such cover.
To the substantial baseline level of concern spouses and siblings have for each other, children have for their parents, and especially that parents have for their children, millions of people are actively ladling over the top a plausible worry that transgender loved ones will be harmed or killed simply for being who they are.
Thanks so much for that, folks.