What It's Like for a Liberal to Wake Up

It's not just the censorship that's hard

Photo by Laura Gilchrist on Unsplash

First, you have a child—or relative or neighbor or friend—dealing with something called gender dysphoria, or identifying as trans. So you take the child to the gender clinic, likely located in a reputable hospital, a center of expertise. You expect the child to be properly evaluated, for their full range of issues to be explored. Instead, the therapist affirms the identity, even the distress, the sense of being in the wrong body. You’re passed on to an endocrinologist, who starts talking hormones, and when you demur or object or question, the doctors bring up suicide—in front of the kid.

This strikes you as anywhere from odd to alarming, so you start poking around. It’s after 2020 now, so you have many more sources of information than just 4thWaveNow, which was for many years the only skeptical outlet providing information to the confused-about-the-gender-confused. You realize that both the therapist and the doctor are, at the least, misinformed. At most, they are dangerous. By reading a few articles, you know more than they do.

All your life, you’ve had faith in people who practice medicine and psychology. Are these just bad apples?

You look to their professional organizations, but they maintain the same slanted and misguiding messaging. All your life, you’ve had faith in professional organizations. Are they…corrupt?

You look at what your children have learned about gender in school. Why are schools teaching these ideas about gender, and reading books that encourage kids who don’t conform to stereotypes to believe there’s something wrong with their bodies? They teach kids that they have the right to dictate how other people refer to them, and that they’ve been harmed if people use the wrong figure of speech. Why are they teaching vulnerable kids to be more fragile, instead of resilient? Also, is anymore gonna teach them, say, math?

You’ve always loved the project of public schools. Can you not trust them anymore, either?

Wait, why are the institutions you grew up admiring—the ACLU, the SPLC, Planned Parenthood—all parroting these same ideas about gender, these same non-facts and bad statistics about suicide?

Is everything The New York Times told you about “gender-affirming care”….wrong? Do the Republicans actually have the science right? Is it not really a left/right issue?

Maybe you try to bring this up with a child or spouse or friend in your liberal community, but you’re shushed. Maybe you’re even shunned. You’ve run into the forcefield of censorship. You are outside the liberal biosphere. You are politically, institutionally, and socially homeless.

Everything is painful, but some part of you knows that this is an opportunity that most people are not afforded: to see the world in a new way. To rebuild and reform alliances. To move beyond partisanship.

Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you. It will be okay.