PSA

If your "hot take" on trans kids is that your kid wanted to be a puppy when they were three, maybe shut up and sit down.

Sure, kids pretend. My kid had this little routine he would do every morning, between the ages of about fifteen months and three years old. "Ask me what I am today!" he would order.

"What are you today?" I would reply. (It was like a little liturgy.)

"I'm a wolf!" he would declare.

Or: "I'm a kitty!"

And then for the rest of the day, intermittently, he howled or mewed or (when he was a lemur) leaped about the room.

Do I need to explain how this is different from being trans?

Because I will.

One is a game. The kid is playing, and you are playing, and we all know it's a game.

A game doesn't cause your child pain. My kid never suffered depression because he wasn't a kitty. He didn't need therapy to understand why he persistently mourned the absence of his kitty body. He didn't require medication because not having a kitty body made him so miserable. He didn't feel, persistently and endlessly and for years, that he was a cat, that this human body was not his own, that this human body was trying to kill him.

Trans is not a kid getting up one morning and deciding they're an attack helicopter, or whatever ever so funny joke you've decided to make about my child.

Trans is the persistent conviction that your body is the wrong gender, often accompanied by crippling dysphoria, or to the point that your life is misery.

If you can't -- or won't -- understand what that is like, then do us all a favor, and keep your bigoted, ugly, ignorant, hate-filled opinion to yourself.

Please.

(Also, just FYI, since some of you are apparently unable to do even the most basic research, no one is giving a three year old surgery -- "cutting off [her] dick," as I saw one charming loser put it -- or HRT, or whatever. When we accept our small child's gender, we're talking social acceptance.: social transition. We use the right pronouns. We help them negotiate the world. We don't try to force them to be what they are not, and we certainly don't do that because we have some conviction of what they "really" are.)

Scamming People for Jesus

Over at Patheos some time back, Libby Anne wrote about a tactic young Evangelicals use -- are taught to use -- which is quite similar to one con men use, not surprisingly.

They find an "in," some area of commonality between them and the 'target,' as Evangelicals call it (or 'mark,' to be more honest about what they're looking for).

In other words, they're looking for common human ground between them and their mark, something they can play on. Once they find this common human ground, they exploit it.

This has happened to my kid, up in Fayetteville, more than once now. My kid is very sweet, with a lot of empathy. They also look gay -- so gay. (Dyed bright purple hair, plaid denim jacket, no makeup.) Invariably a pretty little Evangelical Christian child will sit down next to them and say, in friendly voice, "I like your hair!"

Among the LGBT kids, this is code for, I'm queer, are you queer too?

So my kid responds with a friendly, "Thank you!"

And the Evangelical Christian does some friendly chat, just as if she actually likes the kid, and actually wants to be friends with the kid. And the kid is thinking, aw, I've found a friend, a queer friend, this is nice.

And then the Evangelical asks if the kid wants to come learn about Jesus.

And now my Kid feels stupid, like they're an idiot for thinking anyone would actually want to talk to them, or be friends with them. This Evangelical has made it very clear that the only reason anyone would sit down next to them is in order to run a scam on them -- to lie to them, to cheat them, to con them.

Because they're broken, obviously.

Because they're something that needs to be fixed.

Is this what Evangelicals think their God wants them to do to people? That's what Jesus commands them to do?  Lie to people? Treat them like marks to be cheated and conned into their churches? Make them feel like fools and idiots for trusting people?

I hope one day these people grow up and never stop cringing at how they treated their fellow human beings.


UPDATE: Just to make it clear, I don't blame this little Evangelical child. She's been sent out by someone -- likely someone as brainwashed as herself -- and told to do this horrible thing to her fellow human beings. She's been given a script to follow. She's been told she has to do this, or these poor LGBT sinners will burn in hell. So no. I don't blame her. It is still an evil thing to do, and it is an evil thing to teach her to do. There is a reason bearing false witness is a sin.

LGBTQ, Genderqueer, and the Rest

As long-time readers know, my kid is genderqueer. (They're also an amazing artist*, and if you're not reading their comic you should start now.)

A Curious Encounter

So from time to time -- as many of you do -- I comment elsewhere in the blogosphere.

When I do so, I comment under my blogosphere name: as delagar, in other words. This is a name with no apparent gender. Often enough, out in the 'sphere, people assume I am male. (Go figure!)

Raising a Genderqueer Kid in Arkansas

I didn’t intend to give my kid – a brilliant Jewish atheist with anxiety and depression issues – a childhood in a small hyper-conservative city in Arkansas, where most of the people she went to school with would be Evangelical Christians, not to mention Far-Right (read: Trump-flavored) Conservatives.