To the Parents:

This IS your story to tell

Recently, I met someone whose child had turned 18 and transitioned with hormones and surgery. The parent spoke of how their child’s college options were limited to blue states; elsewhere, the child would be “unsafe.”

Photo by Andrea Lightfoot on Unsplash

I asked as many questions as I could think of, hoping to surface some skepticism on the parent’s part. What did “nonbinary” mean? How did you decide what medication was right? What did “unsafe” mean? It was one way to dispel the tension between us—this person knows my work on gender—but I was also genuinely curious: how do those who’ve facilitated their children’s social and medical transition make sense of it? What were they told? What do they believe?

Later, the person wrote to me, saying they shouldn’t have shared anything, because it wasn’t “their story to tell.” (I hope this is sufficiently vague so that I’ve protected their privacy.) I never responded to their note, in part because the only thing I wanted to say likely wouldn’t go over well:

It is your story to tell. This is your child. This is your family. This happened to you, too.

Six years ago, The New York Times instructed parents: “Celebrate Your Kid’s Transition. Don’t Grieve It.” This parent and I are in the New-York-Times-as-Bible crowd. They’ve got all the news that’s fit to print, thus grieving a child’s transition renders one unfit. On some level, I can’t blame this person for going along with what the medical associations and media and liberal institutions insisted was the truth—even if it conflicted with parental instincts and the family unit. After all, insisting that the story of a child’s radical medical transformation belongs only to that child pokes a hole in the family fabric. But, man, I would really like to know how it all unfolded: a classic ROGD case, a loss of body parts, an insistence that this incredibly privileged person is now the most vulnerable.

I spent many years trying to explain—to people just like this parent—what the illiberal and authoritarian left got wrong about gender, and how if we didn’t clean our own house, the illiberal and authoritarian right would do it for us. I was correct about that, as were many of my fellow liberal dissenters! And now, I spend a lot of time trying to persuade those of us still on the left side of the aisle to speak out against the right and the left. I continue to want to salvage liberalism, but for that to happen we have to figure out how to address the gender issue. Democrats really need help. Still!

Even as I press on those speaking publicly to join me, I don’t press on the parents of kids who’ve transitioned, socially and/or medically, whether those kids have desisted or detransitioned or remained in the belief system. Many of these parents have become single-issue voters. They don’t always pay attention to the larger threats to democracy wrought by Trump. I understand this. Many are, in fact, grieving. They’re grieving that the medical associations and media and liberal institutions pressured them and lied to them and interfered with their families.

Some of them have lost their relationships with their children. Some of them have lost custody. Some of them have lost their children to suicide. Their stories, often collected in PITT Parents, are brutal. They don’t want anyone else to endure what they went through—and neither do I. Had this happened to me—and I pray it never does—I don’t think I’d be out here insisting on nuance. So when you hear me say that we must stand up to the right, just know: I think parents who’ve been through the gender ringer should do whatever they need to stay sane.

As an aside, about PITT: In 2021, I was desperate to write a book about the battle over trans kids and gender-affirming care. My book, Tomboy, had come out the year before, during the pandemic, and I knew that I hadn’t pushed back hard enough on certain things related to gender identity and medicating kids—for a lot of reasons that I detail in the upcoming project. In 2021, I finally learned what I needed to back up my rumbling feeling of “this seems wrong.” My agent told me that, because the subject was so toxic and difficult, and because I already had a contract for a different book, in order to get a contract for this other book I had to get an op-ed or reported story in, well, The New York Times—which had been the incubator for Tomboy.

I spent six weeks researching and writing a pitch, which I sent to The New York Times Magazine. Eventually, I was told that they did want to cover the subject, but would assign it to a staff writer. That became Emily Bazelon’s piece, “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” Like the Times podcast “The Protocol,” the piece took the stance that the old school Dutch protocol version of transitioning kids was good, and the problem was that it went a little nuts in the past few years with the unregulated affirming model—ignoring what was wrong with that original version. My pitch had focused more on how once, mental illness precluded young people from transitioning, but now transitioning was seen as a cure for mental illness. How did that happen, and what was the fallout?

Anyway, many of us spent hours on the phone with Bazelon. I know that she spoke to lots and lots of different kinds of people with different perspectives, as she should have. I felt that if I couldn’t write it myself, at least I could show her what I’d seen. But she didn’t see what I saw, even when we were looking at the same data or parsing the same tales. I still remember the surprise I felt when she alluded to PITT by writing “In February, an anonymous parent on a Substack newsletter affiliated with Genspect wrote a post called ‘It’s Strategy People!’ about how the group gets its perspective into the media by making sure not to talk about their kids as ‘mentally ill’ or ‘deluded.’”

From the dozens of heartbreaking posts about how the affirmative model endangered children and disrupted families, that was the one she chose.

Last weekend, at The Unspeakeasy, I was struck by how many liberals still feel censored. Parents still feel they can’t speak up, for fear of losing their tribe or their children. Professionals, still shushing themselves. Yes, gender clinics are shuttering. Yes, some schools have managed to purge gender identity lessons from the curricula. But in much of liberal America, the landscape hasn’t really shifted. The narrative is still that the right wants to genocide trans kids, and thus the left must protect them. It’s no use explaining that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. To them, it’s the truth.

Those are the people who still need help, who need us to work not just on cutting off the supply but attending to the creation of the demand. Those are the people who still need the nuance, the gentle talking points, the careful poking at beliefs. Those are the people who still need to be told: Yes, this is your story, too. You deserve a voice, and you have the right to use it.