Mom & Dad,
Let me begin by saying that I’ve tried hard to understand why you believe what you do about gender. I was steeped in your beliefs for 18 years, and even after leaving your house and spiritual tradition, I frequently returned to your news outlets just to keep abreast of the sort of information you were absorbing. I’ve listened to the podcast you yourselves create, the one in which you decry the “rise of transgenderism” and tout books about the “G-d-given miracle” of the gender binary. I’ve tried to understand you in ways you’ve never tried to understand me, your non-binary child.
I know now that you and I are operating out of fundamentally different mindsets — that people like you are focused on protecting the social order at all costs. I know you are more likely to endorse fundamental differences across groups of people, and that the logical leap is to buy into transphobic rhetoric of what makes someone inherently a man or a woman. I know you’re more likely to justify inequality than I am. I’ve read all the research about how conservatives like you are less tolerant of LGBTQ+ people (in some cases, especially transgender people); I’ve absorbed the painful blow that some of this intolerance may actually boil down to sheer disgust.
And I know I can’t make emotional appeals to you about why you should embrace trans people. After all, you don’t value emotion the same way others do. You value social cohesion, hierarchy, and social norm adherence instead. As a friend recently reminded me: my emotional appeals won’t force you to reconcile your transphobia with your purported values of kindness and compassion. All I can do is point out the dissonance.
So I want to tell you, then, that it’s a logical fallacy to think your transphobic views are negated by the fact that you’re kind to individual trans people. Yes, you have dared to shake the hand of my trans partner, Ryan. You have baked my trans roommate, Alison, a birthday cake. You have (begrudgingly, and with great effort) used the correct pronouns for Zee, my trans best friend.
You point to these moments as proof that you’re not transphobic — as if baking a cake makes your fundamental beliefs any less abhorrent. You cannot claim to love a trans person, then turn around and advocate for legislation against that same person; use your own podcast to call trans bodies “degraded” and “mangled”; preach damnation against that person; tell that person (your own kid!) that you won’t participate in their gender delusion. I know you think you can do these things, because research has demonstrated again and again and again and again that people like you think you can love the individual but hate the group — and isn’t that an extension of loving the sinner but hating the sin? To love the individual and hate the collective? But the individual is part of the collective, and the collective is made up of the individual.
The trans people you rail against are not an amorphous monolith; they are all Ryans and Alisons and Zees. They are all real, living, breathing human beings with lives just as complex and rich and meaningful as yours (or, I’d argue, more so). When you talk about trans people, you’re talking about me and my beloveds — my friends, my lovers, my roommates, my community. You don’t think you are, because you think you’re talking about the phenomenon of “transgenderism” as a whole. But you are talking about us, you are talking about me, you are talking about me, you are talking about me.
On my self-flagellating days, I want to tell you that I’m sorry I couldn’t be the daughter you wanted — that I couldn’t be your daughter, period. But this is not a self-flagellating day. This is a day where I just wanted you to know that I believe your hands are bloody, and so are the hands of every person like you. I can’t make you see that blood, but I can tell you of the enormity of its impact. Your beliefs have a body count.
Just to make this as clear as possible: my name is Jax, and I’m part of the trans community, and I use they/them pronouns. However I transition in the future is not irreversible damage, but divine alchemy. I know you don’t see me, but that’s okay, because I see me — and so does everyone I love.
You’ll never be able to undo all the harm you’ve done, but may you live long enough to begin to correct it.
Your non-binary kid,
Jax
