We Are All the Beaten Traveler
Warring tribes in the age's most uncertain hour
Reminder! Paid subscriber Zoom tonight.
Thank you to my lovely supporters.
One of my podcast rules is that if Andy Mills is producing it, it’s going to be good. Hence, I started listening to the new podcast Book Keeper without knowing anything about it, other than that it was hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper. She’s the woman who once belonged to the Westboro Baptist Church—of “God Hates Fags” fame—and found her way out of it through heterodoxy: listening to and considering other points of view.
Such stories are my main inspiration, my fuel to continue believing that providing information can help more liberals wake up to the reality that what they think they’re supporting and what they’re actually supporting are not the same.
Anyway…the podcast turned out to be, among other things, Phelps-Roper’s interpretation of Bible stories that affected her as a child. And it is, as expected, wonderful.
Episode two ponders the story of the Good Samaritan, in which some ghouls viciously beat a traveler, and the “good” fellas—a priest, a Levite—just walk on by. A lowly Samaritan, however, tends to the man, and even pays for his continued care.
The lesson: it doesn’t matter if you call yourself a holy man. It matters if you act like one.
This hit me hard because I’ve been thinking a lot about the different gender tribes, which are as hostile to one another as the twelve tribes of Israel, and how I can’t find a home within any of them. There are parents whose children and families have been hurt, and who understandably want people to pay. There are “middle-ground” clinicians who believe that some children are authentically trans and should still be allowed to medically transition as minors. There are people who demand sex-based language even in casual conversation, because they think language must reflect truth…but they probably don’t object to people saying, figuratively, that the sun rises and sets.
In days of yore, we could speak in metaphor without losing our grip on reality. I want those days back.
These various factions seem to critique one another rather than work together, or critique one another for working together (although I am apparently critiquing them, too). Such has been the case regarding an upcoming conference by the group Therapy First, which includes some of those middle-ground clinicians. The prospect of platforming such people, along with those who critique that approach, has upset some folks.
Meanwhile, another tribe—often referred to by critics of gender medicine and psychology as trans rights activists (TRAs)—is also pissed about the conference. They reject not only the critics of the child-led gender-affirming model but the in-group dissenters of the middle ground. Thus, they are hosting a parallel conference on the same day, forcing clinicians to choose between the loud drumbeat of their own echo chamber or a different, discordant tune, with several different points of view. One tribe, or a few.
A group called—not kidding—P-HOLE (The Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education) is staging a counter-conference: TransPollinations. It “brings together psychoanalysts and other mental health practitioners, scholars of trans studies and queer studies, activists, medical professionals, artists, and legal scholars, to generate new and better conversations about trans lives.”
The conference, supposedly, will provide alternatives to “the gender exploratory therapy model.” Problem is, as I explained here, there is no such model! It was a term coined by a psychoanalyst as a way of saying that therapists could explore the distress a person was having about their sexed body or about their sex category in society. It was an invitation for both therapist and client to explore the desire to transition, without affirming a gender identity, which shuts the door on exploration. The affirmative tribe imagined a model to match the phrase, which they decry as conversion therapy and organize against. But the bogeyman that motivates them is not real.
They’ll never know that, though, because they refuse to engage with people who think differently. And that, to me, is the biggest problem.
I want to be a Good Samaritan, who doesn’t care what a model is called, or doesn’t fit neatly into a tribe. I want to walk across the road and help the person see—not with medicine or money, but with the free exchange of ideas and information, even ideas I disagree with. I want to learn how to argue effectively, and not just spout my assertion and run and hide from the confrontation after.
Phelps-Roper talks in the podcast about connections between different sides, about opening hearts and then minds. We are all the beaten traveler in the road. Who among us can be a Good Samaritan?
The sun stays in place, and we twist and turn around it, and it’s beautiful to see the colors, however accurately, or not, you describe it.
Let me leave you with the song that I think should be our national anthem.
American Tune
by Paul Simon
Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I’m alright, I’m alright
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home
And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
But it’s alright, it’s alright
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what has gone wrong
And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying
We come on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune
Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying to get some rest
Hallelujah for you Lisa Selin Davis.
Grateful for you.
I can relate to your feelings, having not settled into any one tribe within the broader gender critical one. And thank you for reminding me of Paul Simon’s brilliant song, which does indeed seem perfect for our current moment.