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.)

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.

Rand Paul, Ayn Rand, Now What Now?

Every so often I get a student who read Atlas Shrugged when he (somehow it nearly always is a male student) was fifteen or sixteen.

He's nearly always an otherwise bright student, a kid I want to like, and try hard to teach.  But his critical acumen has been blunted -- well, destroyed -- by his encounter with this philosophy.  I supposed we can call it a philosophy?  With this crack-pipe of a book.  

In any case, I sometimes try, mildly, to point out the errors of the Randian position (If a fast food company poisoned its customers, who would eat at that restaurant?  If Wal-Mart treats its workers unfairly, surely they would all quit?  If people are injured at the steel mill due to its unsafe working conditions, why, they can always sue!  In civil court, of course.  Or, I suppose, their survivors can...and if enough people sue...and their lawyers are better than the steel mill's lawyers...and the steel mill has not happened to have bought the judge, being vastly richer than the mill worker who is making two dollars a day, why then...) --- it's like arguing with a Pentecostal, though.  Nowadays I mainly smile and say, Ah, Rand.  And move on.

Here, though, at the Washington Monthly, they're still fighting the good fight.  Which pleases me.  Someone needs to.

As Paul envisions the system working, just so long as everyone honors the free market above all, "no one will apply for those jobs" if a mine's operators don't do a good job protecting worker safety.

Tony Oppegard, a Kentucky attorney and mine-safety advocate, called Paul's statement "idiotic." He added that underground mines are already offer dangerous working conditions, and if Paul successfully eliminated safety mandates, "there would be a bloodbath," he said.

As for the notion that coal-mine workers would just get jobs somewhere else if they weren't satisfied with the safety precautions, Oppegard concluded, "There's no other job opportunities."

My President

Well, yeah.

I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.