My Resignation Letter

Celebrating Independents' Day

“What’s your book about?” the chiropractor asks me, but I’m face down, my mouth in a soup of tissue that he’s slid over the headrest.

There’s always the debate. Do I say it? Can I respond openly and generously to whatever the person says back to me? This fella’s older, a born-and-bred Brooklynite with the accent to prove it, his un-renovated office recalling a previous iteration of the neighborhood. Maybe he can take it.

“It’s the story of the youth gender culture war,” I say, my words garbled in the gauze. “Where the ideas came from and why we’re fighting about them.”

“I know why,” he tells me. “The Republicans are dividing this country and this is just a wedge issue to gain them more power.” He presses down hard with calloused hands, my neck crackling beneath them.

“That’s definitely not the whole story,” I say, but he’s not interested. He’s now moved on to what a racist country we are, and I’m trying to tamp down the urge to recite the words of Roland Fryer and John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes, to refrain from citing data that disrupt his notions.

I know the chiropractor can’t really hear me, can’t parse my words—not just because I’m prostrate, speaking into a pleather cave.

He can’t hear me because I don’t agree.

*

In college, they taught me ten-dollar words. I didn’t always know what they meant—and sometimes I didn’t know how to pronounce them—but I knew what they signified: a gentle hazing, in which you learned to utter a garbage dump of crowded, clogged fricatives and sibilants, to show you belonged. Say the word hegemony, synecdoche, birdsong and you were now officially Smart, and thus Better than the others out there, the ones working in maintenance or the cafeteria. We were there to avoid that fate.

I never heard anyone actually utter the word synecdoche out loud, and the one time I said it, I pronounced it sin-i-doche and the scholar I said it to laughed. Sin-eck-dough-key he corrected me. I felt small, but also: yuck. He had family money and an accent that communicated patricianness, which may or may not be a word, and I felt like a dirty, dumb plebe.

Later, in the real world, aware that I had not been trained for any actual job, I grew allergic to the word hegemony. If a poem had the word birdsong I immediately put it away.

Still, I wanted to be included in the group. I always assumed that what everyone around me believed was true, and right. We were the good guys.

*

There was never any question of what party I’d belong to. Republicans are bad—bad people, bad policies. That was a known fact among almost every person I interacted with until a few years ago. And of course, you register as a Democrat because you want to vote in the primary.

But somebody nobody voted for in the primary is now the nominee, and the Republicans are right about the science behind “gender-affirming care,” and about women’s sports, and they were right about much of Covid, and about masking. I don’t know enough about other issues to be able to say who’s got a handle on them, who can help with inflation or bringing down the cost of housing or bringing back manufacturing or navigating the migrant crisis. I only know that I can’t support people simply because of their party affiliation.

I also know that I will never vote for Donald Trump.

*

“My parents used to read The New York Post,” my mother told me recently. “It was left-wing.”

“Yes, the left wing used to be working class,” I reminded her.

*

I go to an old friend’s talk. Somebody uses the word “heteropessimism”—a word I don’t know—and I bristle at it, at the cordoned-off elites coining terms about the masses that don’t actually apply to the masses, that the masses wouldn’t use for themselves. This is a crowd of almost entirely white people who’d use Latinx. They roll their eyes at X, at Elon Musk—the only platform where I feel safe telling the truth. They say, “Anyone of any gender can be a wife.” A middle-aged woman wears a loose cloth mask. People denounce the patriarchy and the institution of marriage and celebrate divorce. Ten-dollar words and the people who utter them cluster, a roomful of erudite fireflies signaling and signaling and signaling. I am one of them, and also not, straddling an unbearably uncomfortable barbed wire fence.

I’ve had so many experiences like this. Why this one pushes me over the tipping point, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the assumption that we all agree on all of these things. But I don’t—not about any-gendered wives or about Twitter or the benefits of divorce.

I feel like a dirty, dumb liberal elite—or, maybe, a failure at elitism, a dirty populist. Get me to the plebes. Take me to your plebe-r.

*

“How was the reading?” my husband asks.

I answer: “I’m resigning from the Democratic party. I’m going to register as an Independent.”

He says: “You haven’t been a Democrat for years.” Also, he points out later, a roomful of erudite fireflies, the 49 million-strong Democratic party is not.

I erupt. I’ve been a loyal Democrat through this whole ordeal. I’ve written to politicians, I’ve tortured my speech into something fake-reasonable, trying to talk to our own people, trying to make liberals liberal again, trying to destigmatize the truth, trying to get us to recalibrate and handle this issue ourselves so the extreme Right doesn’t handle it for us. I wanted us to reclaim the American flag, to embrace patriotism, to value free speech again, to see that, no matter how we deride our own country as racist and transphobic, millions and millions of people try to bust their way in every year, because there is still something beautiful beneath all the fighting—the first amendment, for instance: a crown jewel.

Not a Democrat? Not a Democrat?!

Gender is the only issue I’ve ever known enough about to understand just how wrong The New York Times, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the DOE, the NIH, the Democrats, and the liberals at literary readings have it. If I can’t trust our people about this issue, what else can I trust them about?

Around me, people celebrate Harris’s selection of Tim Walz, and I read about his trans kid sanctuary state bill, which essentially allows a parent to kidnap their child and take them across state lines to get adolescent “sex change” interventions.

“I just can’t bring myself to vote for wokeness,” I tell my husband. “It’s a series of ideas that are fundamentally destabilizing, and you can’t fight extremism with extremism. The more people who register as Independents, the more each party has to move to the middle to chase our votes.”

“She’s just trying to win,” he says, looking over his readers at me.