When we are silent, we are all complicit.
According to the new president of the United States, my 18-year-old son does not exist.
A freshman at The Ohio State University, he’s transgender. Some of his close friends at school know this; other classmates just see him as another guy — if not a particularly tall one.
He doesn’t bother anyone about it, and nobody around him seems to care.
Donald Trump cares.
He took time in his inaugural address to say that he acknowledges the existence of only biological males and biological females. When he got to the White House later that day, he backed up those words, issuing a series of executive orders to strip trans people of rights and their dignity.
My son’s rights were stolen and the nation shrugs
As a mom, more shocking to me than the presidentially announced oppression of a vulnerable minority group has been the collective shrug with which they have been met by the public.
People seemed to be more upset about the first lady’s hat.
I understand the transgender issue is a confusing and difficult issue for many people. It is most difficult for the trans people themselves.
Growing up transgender is not cool, and it’s not fun. Their options for playing school sports are restricted or limited. Even in the most welcoming of communities, so are their options for friends. It’s well known that trans kids have horrifically high rates of suicide.
Trans people exist
A 2018 study by the Hudson Institute of Medical Research found gender dysphoria is caused, in part, by interactions between many different genes, much like height, weight or blood pressure. It impacts less than 1 percent of Americans, but for those people it is quite real.
The overwhelming medical consensus now is that gender dysphoria should be treated with supportive counseling and medical treatment to allow patients to live fulfilling lives, as so many transgender adults do.
Trump has changed his tune on trans people
Until recently, this was not a national concern. The president himself, in his first campaign, famously declared that transgender people can use the restroom of their choice at Trump Tower.
In his 2016 acceptance speech, he promised to “protect our LGBT citizens” from violence. The vice president maintained a strong friendship with a transgender classmate from Yale Law School until launching his own political career a few years ago.
So what changed? Did the president and the vice president learn something new? Did they become smarter? No, just meaner.
When politicians started targeting trans people a few years ago, they said it was because they cared about them. They wanted to protect kids from “experimentation” before they were old enough to make their own decisions.
They don’t say that anymore.
They don’t pretend to have alternative ideas for treating kids with gender dysphoria, and they have no intention of letting them live their lives as adults. They want to punish them, they want to ostracize them, and they want you and me to join them in it.
Confusion has morphed into hate
The word “fascism” gets thrown around too casually, but I honestly don’t know what else to call this.
Back to my son.
Mere hours after being deprived of his federal rights and recognitions, he was inside Ohio Stadium celebrating the Buckeye championship, cheering and laughing alongside hundreds of other students who didn’t know or care about the nature of his biological chromosomes.
He’s doing okay.
Me, not so much. In the past few years, I’ve seen confusion about my kid and people like him morph into hate. Last week, I watched hate become law with the stroke of the pen.
I know we’re all exhausted by the politics of the last decade, and we all want a break from the division and the conflict. But when we don’t speak out, it sends the signal that this is normal, giving license to whatever comes next.
