It's Always the Right Time to Speak Up

Or: Why I am not protesting

“Now isn’t the time,” a friend said to me in 2020, as White Fragility rocketed to the top of the bestseller list. I was skeptical of the book’s claims, that solving systemic racism involved white women taking a hard look at their own failings, and then stifling their inevitable tears.

While I recognized the fallout from real structural racism—like tougher laws on crack than on powder cocaine, or the red-lining of yore—I didn’t think America was the most racist country on earth. I was horrified by George Floyd’s death (if unaware that the media had shown me only a snippet of the full video), but aware of Roland Fryer’s research. His work revealed that white people were in fact more likely to be killed by the police; black people, however, were more likely to be brutalized by them. That research imperilled Fryer personally and professionally. Even a self-made black man employed at Harvard wasn’t safe to tell the truth if it interrupted left-wing orthodoxies (or raised the ire of Harvard’s future president, Claudine Gay).

I wanted to speak up back then. I wanted to articulate that I could consider police brutality a serious problem, and that we still had racist structures to dismantle, but that shaming white women wasn’t the way to do it.

But, my friend said: it wasn’t the right time. Too tense, too tender. I was confused, but I conceded. It was a wild, difficult time, and hard to know what publicly objecting would accomplish, other than inspire internet fury.

Another friend had told me the same thing about detransitioners back in 2017: Don’t mention them in your work. It might hurt trans people. There were so few—what did it matter? Though I had become a writer in order to speak truth, no matter how unpopular, I’d never been told to stifle myself before. But I somehow folded myself into the shape of compliance. Never before had I written things that could be used to hurt vulnerable people, and suddenly there was a moral dimension to truth-telling I’d never faced before.

I’m ashamed now that I accepted these friends’ cautions to shut myself up.

These days, I’m hearing those arguments again, from those in my blue bubble who are aghast at Trump’s policies which single out trans people—or, in another framing, policies that roll back the institutionalization of gender identity, which happened under Obama’s and then Biden’s watch. “Trans people are under attack like never before,” my fellow liberals tell me. “Now is not the time for nuance—we need to protect and include trans people in the resistance.” (Some transsexuals have been part of the resistance to gender identity ideology for years. Why weren’t we inclusive of them before?)

The folks saying this to me are the ones gathering to protest in front of Tesla dealerships. Some of them have invited me to join their cavalcade, and I’m grateful for those invitations—really. I’m grateful that they haven’t dismissed me as right-wing because I spent the last four years relentlessly trying to create space for Democrats to dissent within our own party.

But when I’m invited to join protests, I always respond the same way: No. I don’t want to protest.

I don’t want to protest, because I believe that the institutionalization of gender identity is a huge part of how Trump got elected in the first place. Therefore, I don’t believe that we liberals and Democrats will make any headway until we deal with these gender issues ourselves. We have to commit to reestablishing the truth of biological sex—as Trump’s first executive order did. We shouldn’t have needed that order, nor should it have been controversial. But because of the silence and complicity of Democrats on gender issues, the order was necessary—and, sadly, controversial.

No, I don’t want to protest, because I don’t see us as victims. We brought a lot of what’s happening on ourselves, whether because we hid Biden’s mental deterioration and then usurped the Democratic process by installing an unpopular candidate, or because we refused to listen to concerned liberals who understood that, yes, the Democratic party really was for they/them—the elites who didn’t care about issues that affect most Americans—and not for the regular folks.

The situation we’re in now is a self-fulfilling prophecy—one of the most difficult things to explain to those who did the prophesying. I believe that around 2015, when gay marriage was legalized and both gay and conservative organizations shifted their focus to All Things Trans (coincidentally, the name of NPR’s newest show), we really were making room for a certain amount of gender diversity.

But then we taught the idea of gender identity as fact. We allowed males to be in female-only spaces, based on their self-conception. We forced people to redefine “man” and “woman,” and to twist pronouns into a subjective reality that must be affirmed. We taught three-year-olds that they might be “born in the wrong body” if they don’t conform to sex stereotypes. We insisted that trans people were hated and then set in motion a series of policies that would eventually move us closer to that manifested truth. We built a bridge too far, and thus, it was burned.

No, I don’t want to protest, because protesting won’t do anything. “Trump is bad” proved to be a losing strategy last November. If we want to gain control and the trust of the country back, we have to offer an enticing alternative. We have to show that Democrats are sane, just, law-abiding, and rooted in reality. We have to show that we recognize that USAID shouldn’t have spent millions to advance the Western notion of gender identity in poor countries. That, yes, we have to stop teaching gender identity as fact. That, no, males should not compete against females in sports, or be in their private, sex-segregated spaces. That, yes, there really are two sexes—that’s how every single person roaming the planet got here, by the entwining of the male and female gametes (even if it happened in a test tube). In fact, there are no “gender nonconforming” people without sex—those people don’t conform to the roles associated with their sex! That Biden’s and Obama’s administrations forced the notion of gender identity down our throats in laws and executive orders, and a corrective was needed.

Almost 80 percent of Americans agree with most of these ideas. Trump’s gender policies are his most popular.

Democrats need to get with the majority, and stop clinging to these radical minority views. So how are we doing on that front?

Check out this video shown in Newton, MA. public schools:

Check out this thoroughly INSANE article from NYU student journalists, accusing professors of wrongthink and mischaracterizing organizations trying to help gender-dysphoric kids without the affirmative approach. Good thing the Left and academia is suddenly into free speech again!

Oh wait, they aren’t. They censured a Republican lawmaker for her social media posts about a male—a trans girl—competing on a girls’ track team.

All day long, I sit and work and worry at this book I’m writing, which is about how we got here. In some ways, it doesn’t matter how much crazier this all gets, because my story is about how my people institutionalized the idea of gender identity and then censored objection to it, and what went wrong as a result. Every moment that my people uphold and defend these ideas, they reinforce the need for me to tell this story.

And yet, it pains me so much to see us refuse to shift our stances. How can anybody learn anything if they don’t leave wiggle room to be wrong? We are a nation of fixed mindset, instead of growth mindset. And that’s why Republicans are burning it all down—because we held too tightly to too many bad ideas, unwilling to evolve.

It’s more frustrating than ever in my echo chamber. I can’t breathe, for the hypocrisy. Suddenly, when a pro-Hamas activist (or anti-war protestor?) is on the verge of illegal deportation, my people care about free speech? You, who want to compel the use of pronouns based on subjective feelings, not facts? You, who want to make misgendering a crime worthy of prison time?

That doesn’t mean the Right is any better. As I feared, right-wingers who cried “free speech” when the Left was in charge? They don’t care about it now, either. They don’t care about viewpoint diversity, as I truly do. They care about imposing their viewpoints on others—just as the far Left does.

Back in 2016, when Trump Derangement Syndrome infected the media—it did! Really!—and reporters insisted Every Single Thing that Trump did was equally bad, they lost some credibility. That means that now, as they chronicle Trump’s actions, they seem like the Media that Cried Wolf. Many of us who’ve spent years trying to get them to report on this issue accurately don’t believe them, don’t trust them.

I imagine that It certainly seems that the vast majority of what Trump and his cronies are doing really is bad. I wouldn’t know. I have no idea whom to believe, or where to get accurate information, because the liberal media is back to assuming Trump’s sex and gender policies are as bad as the whiplash tariffs or whiplash Ukraine approaches or the other madness.

So no, I don’t want to protest. I just spent five years working relentlessly to draw attention to these issues, to create space for objection and reform, to tell the parts of the story that were being censored. Forgive me if I don’t want to slap a slogan on a stick and convince myself that I’m doing something other than making myself feel better.

What do those who invite me to protests say when I tell them no—that I tried to affect real change, that we still need that change, and that I don’t think protests make a difference?

They tell me: “Now is not the time.”

In fact, now is the time to speak up. And I say this not just to my liberal friends who were starting to realize something was wrong with our side’s approach to gender. I say this to my ex-liberal friends who voted for Trump, precisely because of the mostly-reasonable executive orders on sex and gender: Speak up!

Speak up about the abuses of power, the insanity of installing Elon Musk as a shadow president, the heartless firings, the overreach, the overcorrections, the lawlessness, the instability, the incoherence. Write to your politicians. Speak to your fellow Trumpers. Admit your reservations in your group chats.

Sure, it’s possible that Trump and his cronies will burn everything down, and most Republicans will go along with it because it’s their wet dream to defang liberal-run institutions, to gut the government and rebuild. Sure, what may happen is that their constituents will help them understand what’s worth saving, and we’ll see certain Phoenixes rise from the ashes. But even that requires pro-Trump people to speak up in favor of what must be saved.

I see among liberals-turned-Trumpers a deeply disturbing fealty, an unwillingness to admit that many more people will be hurt by what Trump’s administration is doing now than were hurt by gender ideology. I see an unwillingness to critique. If you traded one bubble for another, you are not free.

Perhaps they fear that if they admit their choice was deeply flawed, they will feel complicit. Well, let me say this, as someone who reported on trans kids for several years, with that feeling of “something’s wrong” nagging me for ages before I pivoted to face it: You are complicit if you don’t speak up.

Twice, I let friends talk me out of speaking up, no matter how much I wanted to or felt I should. I will never let myself be talked into self-censorship again. I’ll keep speaking up to those protesting or casting themselves as victims, who think marching and chanting will affect change. And I’ll keep speaking up to those who voted in the madness of Trump. Please, my friends: return to the windy tundras of the politically homeless, where there is plenty of room for nuance and disagreement and changing minds. Here, you can speak as loudly as you want.