The Gate. Or: What to Do When the Gender Conversation Goes Bad

Notes from The Unspeakeasy

Photo by Nikola Knezevic on Unsplash

Last week, I gave a version of this talk at Meghan Daum’s Unspeakeasy retreat. (If you’ve been wanting to go on one of these, I strongly urge you to—they’re awesome.) This was the first co-ed retreat—nice job, fellas!—and took place just before the Heterodox Academy conference, which I also highly recommend. Both of these events focused on the positive—not just what’s going wrong but what’s going right. What new Phoenix flowers are growing in the ashes of the self-immolating left?

I’ve been struggling to learn the skills I talk about below, but I feel it getting more and more possible. If you have other techniques for these difficult interactions, please share. Comments are open.

—Lisa

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Here’s the scenario. I’m riding in the car with my friend B, on the way to a vacation weekend.  

B is the nicest human being I have ever met: religious and spiritual, very even-keeled, and endlessly generous. We’re chatting about her church and her job, and I don’t know how it happens—likely I steer the conversation this way—but suddenly, she’s telling me about how her friend has to leave a certain European country because of all the anti-LGBTQ stuff going on in school and with medicine. It’s not safe for her and her child.

This is the moment of the record scratch, when I realize that B and I do not share a common reality, that what I perceive as progress and safeguarding and protecting gay kids is, to her, “anti-LGBTQ.” To me, changes like England announcing that “the contested theory of gender identity will not be taught” or restricting the use of puberty blockers to clinical trials—those are all hard-won examples of progress. To her, they are hateful.

What should I do in that moment?

First, let me tell you what I actually did, and what I always do: I say that I think there’s another way of interpreting those policies that her friend experienced as “anti,” and explain a little bit about why I think that. Gender identity is, as it’s presented today, a theory, not a fact, I say. Some kids are getting hurt. The evidence isn’t good.

These arguments have little effect on B, who explains that her friend’s kid was not just bullied but physically assaulted, and the school won’t protect them because the child is trans. The air has shifted; the tension I’d felt inside is now externalized, a flurry of discomfort changing the emotional weather.

That’s awful, I say. And I mean it. But, yeah, that’s different. 

Then I try one more tack. I explain that the messages about being born in the wrong body are pretty awful for a kid like mine—a kid whom B has known since my daughter was born. I offer that most kids like that, although not all of them, end up being gay, and it’s not right to teach them that there might be something physically wrong with them because they are different, and that’s why I don’t think those theories are appropriate to teach kids, especially not when they’re presented as facts.

I can understand that, she says. Now we’re just in the snow drifts of discomfort, enough smooth road ahead that we can switch the conversational direction. But the atmosphere is not the same, and I’m sad and sorry because I understand that whatever I thought I was saying to her, I was actually telling her that she was wrong.  

Sure, I did it very gently, partly because I’ve been in this situation enough times now that I am able to sense my own internal shift, the extreme discomfort that befalls me at such moments—and partly because I was dealing with the kindest person on earth, who clearly meant me no harm. But nonetheless, that moment of record scratch—I do seem to interpret that as hurtful, and I protect myself by lashing out, no matter how couched in politeness. What happened was: she told me about a person close to her who was experiencing psychic pain, likely expecting me to commiserate, and I argued instead.

I’m trying to get good at recognizing these moments—the realization that the person I’m talking to is looking at the same thing and seeing it completely differently—so that I can decide about how to respond, rather than just react.

I’ve come to see them as a gate coming down, an impasse. That gate is a feeling, that happens first inside me; the person I’m talking to might not even notice. Though it starts as a prick of dissonance—our separate and parallel realties raising my hackles—for me it turns into something else very quickly. What’s usually happening is that I’m feeling disrespected, which is the hardest feeling for me to tolerate. How dare someone tell me about what’s anti-LGBTQ, when I’ve been reporting for weeks, years, about why those changes are welcome! Sure, there are times when the people I’m talking to do disrespect me. But for the most part, they just assume I’ll agree because I’m a liberal, and so are they. They have no idea that speaking what they think is the truth will knock me off axis.

Whatever their motivation, as soon as the gate goes down, I’m desperate to lift it, to resume moving forward—because I am stuck there in that deeply uncomfortable feeling. My instinct is to soothe myself by telling the other person why they are wrong and I am right, thus demanding respect (which can never be commanded, only earned, but it’s hard to tell myself that in such times). I am desperate to educate them, to get them on my team, to have them see what I see—not only because I care passionately about this issue, but because their beliefs conflict with and contradict mine, forcing me to question myself, to defend my positions, to ask if I’m wrong—all things I should be doing all the time but don’t always have the confidence to handle. So I want out. I want to open the gate.

I bang on it with my bad behavior, but there’s only one way to open it: with the magic words. It can’t be forced open, or argued open, or demanded open. It can only open by saying some version of this sentence:

“Tell me more about that.”

It doesn’t matter which person says it. It only matters that they mean it, that one of you summons genuine curiosity (can something you summon be genuine?) and asks the other to walk through what they think or feel or know. 

What were the anti-LGBTQ policies she was talking about? What names were they calling the kid? How old is the kid, and what’s the kid’s story, and what’s the mom’s story, and are they okay, and where are they planning to move?

I never asked. I don’t know. Yet these are all things I would ask someone if I were interviewing them, if I had slipped into work mode: professionally curious. And sometimes people who’ve affirmed or transitioned their kids won’t talk to me, so if there’s a Believer in my midst, willing to chat, it’s a rare opportunity to truly try to understand how they came to believe, to decode how they make sense of their worlds and words and actions. If I didn’t feel disrespected and threatened, I really would like to hear about it. I really, really would.

The biggest barrier to this kind of connection, the coming together to lift the gate, is that word: “anti.” My friend is religious, a theist. I’m an atheist (though happy to change my mind given good evidence.) Though few theists ever ask me about my atheism, about the joy and wonder I feel looking at the stars and trying to conceive of the limits of the universe, I do often ask my religious friends about their experiences. I am truly curious, and never threatened—sometimes a little jealous, to be honest, of their certainty and their community. Faith: it’s a lovely word, and it must be a wonderful feeling.

Even if my believer friends aren’t curious about me, they don’t think I’m a God-hater, or a religious person-hater. They don’t talk about me as anti-God. They don’t categorize me as bad. The words, “anti-trans” or “anti-LGBTQ” are anti-curiosity and anti-question. They’re conversation killers. They shouldn’t be used in media stories or between friends, because many things labeled that way are pro-LGB or pro-woman, or have many other interpretations. If I believe something that you’ve labeled as anti, then the gate goes down. But here’s the thing: then it’s on me to try to lift it. Defending myself is not the way to do that.

It's not an easy thing to do, to take the red pill and sit comfortably with people still ingesting the blue. And they probably think the same thing about me, that I’ve wandered off the moral path or entered some alternate reality. Maybe they want to be curious, but they think it’s dumb or dangerous or hateful or boring. They also probably don’t want to have unproductive conflict, to choose ideology over connection, to feel confronted by disruptive ideas and ideals.

They also want to lift the gate and move forward. And maybe they don’t know the magic words yet. If I can’t teach them about gender identity or the science of gender-affirming care, maybe I can teach them how to say: “Tell me more about that.”