Chapter 6: The Gender Binary and the Anxiety of Ambiguity

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Our family’s journey began on an Easter Sunday more than a decade ago, with a two-and-a-half-year-old who had channeled Jackie Chan rather than put on a dress. What I saw that morning was not a child performing an ideology. It was a child telling the truth about his experience in the only language he had. This episode is about how I learned to receive that truth honestly—and about the science that changes how you hear the whole story.

I give you the clinical evidence up front, because it’s unambiguous. Gender identity is present and stable from early childhood and is not amenable to social pressure. When a child’s identity is affirmed, outcomes are dramatically better—the variable that produces the difference is not the child, it’s the response of the people around them. The biology of sex is not binary. Gender identity is not binary. The Tordoff study found access to gender-affirming care associated with sharply lower odds of depression and suicidality. For our family, affirming our son’s identity was a decision made to keep him alive.

I also trace where the campaign against transgender children actually came from—not from worried parents or uncertain physicians, but from a specific political calculation made in Houston in 2014, a bathroom-panic template that was replicated nationally and then refocused on the most vulnerable target available: kids. I testified before the Michigan State Board of Education in 2016. I talk about a bill that sought to make my support for my son’s evidence-based medical care a felony punishable by life in prison.

My son is seventeen now. He has navigated all of this with a composure most of the adults opposing him cannot muster. If the people who hold power would have one real conversation with one of these kids, the manufactured certainty would crumble. Because kids don’t perform certainty. They live.