Have You Written to Politicians, Teachers, Family Members About Gender?
A request for your letters
Dear readers,
I saw some of you sharing ideas about letters to politicians in the comments recently, and had an idea. If you’ve written to your school principal or your local representative or your woke Aunt Sally, articulating your concerns, would you consider sharing your letter with this community so people can adopt and adapt them? It can be completely anonymous, or credited to you, whatever you like.
I would love them to include links when you make claims about evidence or harms, and if you want to say anything about the technique you used (Pathos? Logos? Personal stories?) and how it went, that would be great.
Email it here so I can keep it separate from all the other email I haven’t answered! (If I owe you an email response, sorry, ping me again, I’m under water). Let’s try this experiment and see if it’s useful to people. Here’s the new “Letters to Change Minds” section where they’ll be stored.
Thanks a bunch,
Lisa
This would be so helpful to me! Whenever I try to write, the emotion takes a higher seat because I’m wrapped up in it. If I was “out of the woods” on this with my daughter, I might have more energy and clarity to write. But of course, I may never be out of it, so a jump start to get writing would be sooo appreciated.
This is a great idea. I’d like to be more active and my daughter isn’t entrenched in the ideology as much as I feared at first, but I can still write from a personal perspective. The issue is so complex and it’s hard to know where to start and how much to say, especially with fellow liberal friends/family who are not personally affected.
I had a therapist several years ago, an older woman in a very liberal area of the country, who I told my concerns to, and at the time she was not that familiar with the surge in teens adopting the ideology. I sent her some background articles and she quickly grasped the problem. I lucked out. She was very pragmatic and came from a background of believing/observing that “trans” was very rare. She supported me and when I told her that my husband kind of just wanted to avoid the whole subject with our daughter, hoping it would go away like a phase, she said that my daughter needs to hear my voice, and so I continued to have conversations with her, not just about teens and trans but about feeling not-great as a woman in the world, about fairness in women’s sports, about questioning right-left thinking. I have more to do but in short I think it’s important to also reach out to therapists who we know or see who don’t have many teen clients. They can help us, but we can also help them.