Trying to Breathe from Inside the Blue Bubble
A Day in the Life
6:00 a.m. Up, coffee, kids, try not to descend into the depths of New York Times word games and instead make your way to the YMCA for Pilates class, which leans heavily toward the geriatric demographic. Normally, to offset the groans of grateful but straining exercisers, the teacher reads jokes:
Why do cows wear bells?
Because their horns don’t work!
Today, however, she reads a quote: Science is true whether you believe it or not.
Indeed, you think, flapping your arms during the Hundreds. Others whoop and holler in agreement, taking pleasure not just in the shared reality but in the shared certainty. Then she reads the name of the person who said it: Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Your arms flop to your side in defeat. You, a lover of astrophysics—whose only spiritual experience involves looking up at the stars and pondering how they might have died thousands of years ago, leaving behind this ghostly, long-traveled light—once admired him, as your fellow inhabitants of LiberalLand do. But then you saw him talking about sex and gender, and your faith in him fell away.
That sex in humans is binary and unchangeable is true whether deGrasse Tyson, or everyone else in Pilates class, believes it or not. But they have been twisted out of their common sense, subsumed by the need for ideological belonging. Having never really had a tribe, you can’t totally relate, though you understand that the other thing that’s true about humans is that we are herd animals. You get it, but being surrounded by their certainty, slathered in a layer of smugness, feels like trying to take a nap on a bed of cockroaches. The urge to cry out, to flee—it’s strong.
By some miracle, you manage to say nothing, at least until after class when you walk up to the teacher and suggest that, while the quote may have seemed apolitical, it is in fact not, due to what deGrasse Tyson has said about sex and gender. You just came there to do exercise, you plead to her. You are shaking, which is embarrassing, but also revealing: no matter how long you’ve been doing this, how much you know, it’s terrifying to dissent from the institutional gender grand narrative.
Oh, I know, I know, I just forgot, she says, and you realize that she thinks the man of science said something transphobic—like, you know, that sex is binary and unchangeable—and that she now thinks she has soiled the purity of the Pilates class by evoking the sinner’s name. You hope she Googles the video and that the confusion she feels morphs into questioning.
You finally exit the room to a slew of people ping-ponging in ACLU t-shirts. It’s 8:52 a.m. and you’re exhausted.
Because you are tired of that aching, shaking, scared feeling, and tired of the sensation of being pushed down an elevator shaft every time you’re confronted with someone living in the solipsistic, self-satisfied certainty—which is actually resting on a falsehood—you’ve been trying a new tack. You aim to be curious about every person you pass on the street or in the subway or in a place of business, to remember that they each have a unique story that, if you can just stop seeing them as potential threats, you could be fascinated by. Every person who pours you coffee or takes your ticket or asks for money. You walk by a park and take in every individual on the benches, and you are overwhelmed by the beauty of diversity in your city, African immigrants, white punkish addicts in their amphetamine-leans, teens of every skin shade laughing hysterically, young lovers, old couples, gay people and straight people and, yes, transitioned people. They all live right here in this city with you. None are leaving whether one group dislikes the other—not even the addicts, though it would be nice to send them off somewhere for help.
You think of the “resistance,” as you call the strange coalition of those who don’t believe in gender identity and want to see it treated as a religious belief—one people are free to share but which cannot be imposed on others. Among them are those who say things like trans people don’t exist or no one should ever transition. They are free to believe that, too, but you live here, among those who believe in gender identity, who call themselves trans, and who have found the benefits of what they’ve done to themselves greater than the harms or risks. They believe that they have changed sex, or aren’t the sex they are, or have entered some new loop of a category. They haven’t, but saying they don’t exist is like saying Catholics or Jews don’t exist because there is no God. There are trans people the same where there are Muslims or Zoroastrians: because of what they believe.
The problem is that they don’t see themselves as believers. They see themselves as soothsayers.
You know that gender believers aren’t leaving, or shifting, and long for a world in which we don’t bother trying to eradicate those who disagree with us but instead create policies that are rooted in reality and still make room for belief.
Lunchtime. You have a meeting about a panel you’re trying to convene on Title IX. You want people to understand why and how it changed and what the implications were, and are. You keep writing to organizations to see if they’ll sponsor something. You want to hear from people who believe deeply that adding gender identity was necessary and helpful; from the scholars who understand the law’s history and evolution; from those who object to replacing sex with gender identity. You want people to have all the information so they can make informed opinions. You want to model a public conversation and debate.
One woman says she’s interested in such an event, but the problem is that it might make some trans women feel bad. The feeling of being tossed into a chasm, it happens so fast. You say that the feelings of one group aren’t more important than the other, and that thinking that way is partly how we got here, and that this is exactly why we need such an event.
This is why you do best typing into your computer. You are lacking in some basic Dale Carnegie skills.
In the afternoon, a pop into the school—the same school where the PTA scheduled you to give a talk about gender norms to the community, and then cancelled when a parent complained, never telling you what the complaint was. The school where the superintendent—whose wife works at a gender clinic—personally intervened to make sure you could never have any kind of platform or publicly address the larger New York City public school community.
Briefly, parents at the school formed a “queer families” group. You joined, and thanked them for including you—the parent of a lesbian—because it’s really important to be inclusive and that means including people who don’t believe in gender identity and are concerned about telling masculine girls and feminine boys that there’s something wrong with their bodies. The group either never met again or excluded you. Since you couldn’t beat them, you tried to join them, but they wouldn’t let you.
Today, they are reviewing the presentations seniors have crafted about their spring semester internships, and have invited any parents to attend (even you). One boy describes his absolutely wonderful experience at WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show—a media outlet you once held in high esteem, but which is so painfully biased that it is damaging listeners’ ability to understand certain culture war issues. You try explaining the problem to the boy, but he says they let callers in who disagree, they cover both sides, it’s nonpartisan, it’s not biased. Your attempt to give him a history lesson is inappropriate and ineffective. You were feeling better. Now you are feeling worse.
Later, there’s a school fundraiser, the kind where parents dress up and the booze is free to encourage binge spending. You don’t want to go. You’ve never felt welcome or included or safe, words school personnel use to mean: we purge people like you, who disagree. But you decide to join ‘em again because, fuck it, your kids have thrived there, some of the teachers are amazing, and a lot of the parents are cool.
There’s a lesbian couple at the auction that you’ve never seen before, one of whom has very short hair and is wearing clothes that are designed for and marketed to men, and has clearly had her breasts removed and sounds like she has probably taken some testosterone, and you get to chatting with them about the various items the school is auctioning off in the hopes of raising money. We bought the personal shopping experience last year and it was amazing, they tell you, and you wish you’d bid on it because nothing fits your perimenopausal body. But mostly you think how lovely it is that a couple like this can partake of concierge shopping at Nordstrom and feel welcome and included and safe, because they should.
On the one hand, anyone who transitions needs to be a fortified to exist in a culture that might not understand or like it. On the other, you have every right to your personal shopping experience if you paid for it.
The school personnel say wonderful things about your children, and you know that they do feel welcome and included and safe, and that’s great, though of course what you really want—for your kids, for all kids, for the families—is for them to feel fortified: strong enough to push back against ideological beliefs presented as facts.
You leave there happy that you went, hoping that if the couple ever finds out who you are, they’ll still be friendly anyway, because why can’t we have contradictory beliefs and still get a drink? Wouldn’t this be better than trying to destroy anyone who questions those beliefs?
Arriving home, you encounter an uncharacteristically chatty and snuggly 11th grader, who listens to you—listens!—express these various thoughts about gender and inclusivity and queerness and says things that clearly show she feels strong enough to push back against ideological beliefs presented as facts.
And you think: This was a hard day and a good day. And you think: What a miracle. What a miracle, this child and her sister and our little life.
You go to sleep brimming with gratitude. For once, you sleep well.