Why We Need to Talk About Trans—Even in Polite Company | Jenny Poyer Ackerman

This is the first paragraph I ever wrote about my introduction to gender ideology. Imagine you've just hung a painting on your living room wall. Stepping back to have a look, you realize the hanger should be a few inches to the left. Just now a neighbor pops in and offers this solution. Hire a builder to move the chimney, the door, and the windows a few inches to the right. Seeing your look of doubt, she summons other neighbors to weigh in. Enter the doctor, teacher, and therapist from down the street, each more insistent than the last. To center the painting, you must rebuild the house, and you must do it now. Yes, there will be a lengthy, costly period of mess and discomfort. The doorbell will never work again, and you might have to come and go through a window. These are but small concessions to the feeling of spatial congruence that may or may not come, but anyway, it's your only option. I return to this parable because it is precisely as absurd as the counsel I would get from serious-looking adults about the novel condition my daughter diagnosed for herself at 13. If there's one quality that's fundamental to the epic folly that brings us here, it's the relentless, unflinching absurdity. At this conference two years ago, the MIT professor Alex Byrne noted, quote, we live in strange times when a man with a Ph.D. can make an honest living explaining how there are exactly two sexes, unquote. Two years later, the discourse has evolved, so now you can hear me, a mom with a bachelor's degree and an Etsy shop, hold forth on how there are exactly two sexes the way things were meant to be. Seriously, what does it mean to be an authority on a subject that is the sworn enemy of reason? I've thought about this a lot, and I've come to see the absurdity itself as a permission slip for all of us, underachievers included, to find our voices and use them. I'm here because Stella and Jen Specht have always cared about the parents who find ourselves in this unenviable spot. We've already heard from two such parents today, Aaron Friday and Lisa Duvall. While I'm not an expert in the law like Aaron or in clinical psychology like Lisa, I do have a podcast on which they've both been featured, as have a whole bunch of the rest of you here. I have a substack where I write about the intersection of gender ideology and politics. I published a chapter on rapid-onset gender dysphoria in that book, and I serve on the board of DIAG, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender. I fell into this rabbit hole in 2016, which was the dark ages for anyone seeking any kind of facts about transgenderism. It would be fully five years before I felt informed enough to write and speak about it. What I finally realized was that the aura of mystique around the subject was nothing more than a cynical tactic manufactured by activists to instill fear. The final absurdity might be how incredibly cathartic it is to say out loud the things everyone knows are true. That's what I'm going to recommend to my fellow parents in particular. But first I'm going to share parts of my story that I haven't before, including details of my daughter's experience. I want you to know I ran the speech by her first, and got her permission to talk about some of what she's been through. My daughter is 22 now, and for nearly half her life, she's been navigating a channel between two competing visions of her future. On one side, an understandably seductive promise that a girl has the power and the right to reinvent herself as a boy, a promise that can be as hard to relinquish as it is to fully believe in. On the other side, it's just prosaic reality, offering the same potential triumphs and defeats that real life has forever laid on the table for humans to pick and choose from. There's almost nothing to recommend reality except that the other option is an illusion that will force you not only to lie to yourself every second you're awake, but to demand others pretend to believe you. This is a punishing way to live. No one who loves you would want you to live this way. Yet you are told the opposite is true. Recall the original trans child, the Reimer twin, who became the victim of Dr. John Money, was a baby boy whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision, a procedure I've opposed vehemently for going on three hours now. It was decided that he'd be carved into female form only because his presenting injury was so tragically hopeless. The cruelest thing imaginable would be for him to let him become an adult man lacking male genitalia. Remarkably, that baby's worst case scenario has been rebranded as my daughter's best case scenario. She's been instructed that her very survival demands that she pretend to be a man lacking male genitalia. How is this prescription applied to a healthy adolescent girl, anything but the cruelest thing imaginable? And while we're at it, why isn't it widely known that the original trans child, who was more rigorously affirmed than any other child in history, grew up to take his own life? Those strike me as some of the first questions one might want to ask before advising a young girl that her future happiness relies on her potential to mislead strangers as to her sex. As I've told my daughter, I'm profoundly sorry I allowed people so reckless and unserious to get close to her. That said, we've succeeded in dodging the worst of the bullets. My daughter's healthy body has not been subjected to puberty blockers, exogenous hormones, or surgery, and she remains a beloved integral member of our close-knit family. In the dystopian story arc families like mine are stuck playing out, these count as major victories which elude the grasp of far too many. But it would be misleading to say we got away unscathed or even that we've got away completely. There were so many hospital admissions I stopped counting. There were several stays in psych units longer than a week. There were two emergency residential placements, each about a month long. There were emergency psych holds, partial hospitalization programs, and hundreds of hours of individual family and group therapy sessions, mostly conducted by captives to the delusion of affirmation. Our daughter missed both her brother's high school graduations. One year she missed Thanksgiving. The final stop was a therapeutic boarding school, which I now believe was the first treatment setting that offered more help than harm, and my daughter agrees. If you're wondering why all these separations were necessary, it's hard to say. She never attempted suicide, but from time to time, often at school, she would tell someone she might attempt suicide, and then the ambulance would appear. Because she was an adopted child, I sometimes wondered if the separations were analogous to a transplanted organ rejecting the host body, something painful and unfortunate yet beyond anyone's power to fix. Given all the unknowns, how could acute mental health treatment make things any worse? My imagination was too limited to know this was a question worth asking. My husband and I adopted our daughter in Russia in 2004. While there, we had to place our trust in a cast of characters that seriously included a former KGB officer. All the passive cigarette smoke notwithstanding, every member of that cast faithfully and efficiently executed his or her job. Our new daughter was 10 months old when we brought her home to grow up alongside our two sons, who were then 4 and 6. She became part of our family as naturally as I'd hoped, but we didn't know much about her genetic risks, including those around mental illness. What mattered was that she'd been lifted out of institutional care to be raised by loving, stable parents and two objectively awesome brothers, plus a large extended family, all of whom would welcome her with open arms. She'd have first-rate health care and occupational therapy to catch up with developmental targets. Then she'd attend public schools that proudly displayed the blue ribbons they'd surely jumped through many qualifying hoops to earn, all of which made for a pretty great run for a full 12 years until the most unlikely turn of events unfolded in one of those blue-ribbon schools of all places. The staff there were all mandated reporters of any adult behavior that might threaten a child's health and safety. They were also trained to affirm and possibly suggest delusions of students inhabiting improperly sexed bodies. I'm pretty sure they missed the irony. Many parents got a version of the same coming-out letter that was downloaded from whichever app or website pronounced our kids trans. Mine was delivered by hand on a morning when my daughter and I were alone in the kitchen. What I remember from the conversation that followed was that she wanted to be the type of boy who wore colorful skinny jeans and Converse high tops. It sounded incoherent yet manageable, something that would resolve sooner if I didn't overreact. A few weeks later, the drama intensified after school on a Wednesday when my daughter had a tennis lesson scheduled at 4.30. When it was time to go, I found her in her room curled up on the bed. She said simply, I feel unsafe, and kept repeating those words without looking at me or explaining what she meant by them. By the time we entered the hospital, maybe 90 minutes later, one of us was crying uncontrollably. I knew everything had changed, but it would take me years to understand why and how. As I've said, my imagination was at that point way too limited to take in all the dark, twisted players and perverse incentives that made the events of that day possible, if not inevitable. I do know the school staff were not evil monsters who harbored fantasies of ruining kids' mental health. Like all the other members of what I call team kindness, they were just astonishingly credulous marks for what would prove to be the most anti-child, anti-gay, anti-family assault on reason in living memory. Like me, they probably had imaginations that were the wrong size and shape for this unique malignancy. But they were also driven by less consequential incentives. For a middle school teacher, the willingness to participate in a psychological experiment on kids might stem from a normal go-along-get-along disposition or just a low threshold for friction at work. Some are no doubt true believers, convinced they're performing heroic rescue operations. In any case, an 8th grader would be gone in less than a year, so the long-term implications would be someone else's problem. For me, the stakes were obviously higher by definition, but the truth is, I don't like friction either. It was 2016, and there was no roadmap except the one leading straight to crazy town. The situation was so unreal, my instinct was to resist giving it oxygen. That was probably a mistake. I have this weirdly vivid memory of a moment that happened when I was a preteen, standing in line at the grocery store with my mom. She pointed to the sign above us that read, Express, 10 items or less, and she said, that should say fewer, not less. Then she explained how numbered nouns have different modifiers than the other nouns, and it did sound plausible, but the thing was, that sign had not been scrawled with a magic marker by some stoner in the back. No, it had been professionally printed, like at the sign factory. And not only that, there was another one just like it, hanging over the lane next to us. So my mom had to be mistaken. She did not go on to teach me the meaning of cognitive dissonance that day, but it's the only reason that scene survives in my memory all these decades later. I couldn't make both things true. If the correct word was fewer, a whole succession of grown-ups doing grown-up jobs for money would have all had to make the same mistake. Yet the sign was still hanging there, uncorrected. This violated my sense of how the world worked. Now think about what it's like for a preteen in the digital age to be virtually bombarded with very authoritative-looking messages, targeting her most private insecurities and printed at today's version of the official sign factory to warn her she's living in the wrong body and that ignoring this warning could be fatal, while acting on it could bring the fulfillment of dreams she'd never even thought of dreaming. As problematic as this is, it still describes a harm vector that's confined to the alt-universe inside her phone. The real-life harm spiral can't be activated until the fantasy is concretized in her physical life by peers and, more importantly, by trusted adults. Which brings us to Part 2, Assigned Democrat at Birth. I wish it was my copyright, but ADAB is a term coined by our friend Mrs. Miller on Substack. I wish it wasn't the case, but the truth is Team Kindness, who are not the profiteers, but the cheerleaders of trans-exceptionalism, are mostly women just like me. I'm a lifelong Democrat and a coastal liberal who was comfortably smug in the certainty that all my luxury beliefs were the correct ones until the ice bucket of gender ideology was dumped on my head. Since then, I've done some recon as to why the smugness felt so right. I've written about this at length and was planning to give it more time here, but then some recent events happened that also felt important, so I'll cut to the chase on politics. If you were born to politically engaged Democrats in the U.S. in the 1960s or 70s, especially if they were atheists like my parents, you didn't need much persuading that our side was the righteous and honorable one. You inherited a politics that felt unassailable as a moral center of gravity and even as a proxy for the religion you didn't inherit. Just as there is a chain of trust in medicine, as described by Dr. Stephen Levine, so is there a chain of trust in our politics that provides a pre-approved checklist of beliefs. I've heard Lionel Shriver describe this as the pre-feeks menu. I call it a belief bundle. I would say liberals broadly associate our belief bundle with civil rights, environmental protection, and a strong safety net. I think the events of the 1960s and 70s, punctuated by the serial assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., all within five years, elevated these values to something like religious conviction for many on the left. When eventually the turmoil eased up, Democrats remained spiritually faithful, but we took our eye off the bundle's specific contents and allowed some toxic fringe beliefs to sneak in and fester. The excesses of the right increasingly became the focus of our discourse, which made us vulnerable to the incredibly stupid idea that there could be no enemy to our left. If there was any move toward auditing the old belief bundle as a matter of hygiene, that idea got a rain check. So it's raining pretty hard now, but the party of honor and righteousness can't seem to open its own umbrella. Today, most Democrats would rather drive off a cliff than admit we got something wrong that Trump, of all people, gets right, especially when it's a moral question, or maybe worse, a question of sloppy intellectual labor. This one is both. Trans ideology is, crucially, the marquee work product of the high priests of the left, medical doctors, Harvard and Yale professors, ACLU attorneys, and New Yorker magazine editors. So to pull this particular item out of our belief bundle and hold it up for inspection is to risk the collapse of our most sacred temples. Thank you. An added problem for elected Democrats is that some unknowable number of their voters are casualties of gender ideology who prefer to think of themselves, at least for now, as targets of the right. So when a prominent Democrat like Congressman Seth Moulton says something as anodyne as I wouldn't want one of my daughters to get mowed down by a boy on the soccer field, my hunch is that for every message of support he gets from one of us, there might be another ten anguished pleas urging him to resist the MAGA extremists who would deny their child's right to exist. Those people are his constituents, too, and even if they don't know it yet, they are likely to have needs far into the future that will require a truly kind and compassionate political response. DIAC, which I'm proud to represent as a board member, understands the contours of the coming storm since many of us live directly in its path. The founders of DIAC are mothers whose work in family situations make it too risky for them to go public, as I've been able to do. Instead, in what I consider both the most selfless and also the most ambitious response I've seen, they channeled their grief and anger, as well as their hopeful energy, into building a grassroots organization that could, with enough support and momentum, help the Democratic Party regain an honest and constructive footing. With a name that begins with Democrats, DIAC gives cover to liberals and feminists who are infuriated by the suggestion that objective reality is a right-wing prejudice. Our name also presents a direct challenge to politicians who find our views inconvenient. To be candid, I couldn't bring myself to vote for a single Democrat in the last election, and I don't make excuses for my party's cowardice or its betrayal of women and girls. Also, America is a democracy whose stability requires at least two viable parties. When the wheels come off one party, the other party tends to follow suit, and that's a harm spiral I think we should avoid at all costs. DIAC is a 501c3 nonprofit run entirely by volunteers with a presence in 48 states so far. We believe it's every child's right to grow up in a healthy body and a healthy democracy, and we could really use your support. We have a whole contingent here this weekend who would love to tell you more. Conclusions. My mother was right, and I should have believed her. If we ever want to hear those words from our kids, we'll have to make sure they have the benefit of our wisdom. Our confidence in our authority as parents has suffered a serious prolonged beating at the hands of team kindness. At times, we've been so taken aback by the sheer force of their hubris that we could only retreat and regroup. But even in retreat, we rarely took a day off from our mission to research the issue until we understood every study, every player, every artifact of conceivable relevance, so that by now we kind of are the experts. The emperor's new clothes analogy is often invoked, but I like the Wizard of Oz here for its emphasis on pulling back the curtain. What's behind this curtain of silence or kindness or fear is, after all, a humorless group of misanthropic men with at least one unseemly sexual fetish and advanced coding skills. Their physical presence is a noxious threat to women and girls in spaces where they know they're unwelcome. Their virtual presence is a predatory threat to boys via pornographic online grooming. Yes, you can say they've been among us forever, or at least as long as there's been plus-size lingerie and selfie sticks, but it's recent technology that's enabled them to wreak havoc at scale. When people begin to grasp this reality, they'll tend to agree that a civilized man doesn't conduct political advocacy by nailing a rat to the door of a rape shelter. Decent men toss neither tomato juice nor eggs nor urine at women who dare to speak up for the safety and dignity of their children and themselves. Mentally stable adults do not use a public enemies list to intimidate every nurse, mother, and college athlete who's ever spoken out. And when beloved comedy writers can be rounded up by armed concierge SWAT teams every time some bloke in woman face frowns at a tweet? Civilization is under assault, and these are not mere flesh wounds. I decided to address the controlling influence of activist autogynophiles in response to something Glenna Goldis said to me on my podcast. She said, I think we're being too nice. She's right. I was happier when my imagination couldn't fathom the scale of depravity, misogyny, and nihilism that fuel trans ideology. You were probably happier then, too. But knowledge, even unpleasant knowledge, is power, which means there is more power in this room than a thousand rat nailers could hope to withstand. They did score a disheartening victory last month when they reduced the man known as the godfather of evidence-based medicine, Gordon Guyot, and his research team at McMaster University to discredit their own systematic reviews of treatments that include healthy breast amputations on girls. In so doing, the academics made a show of loving Big Brother in heels more than their own integrity. The team was, in Dr. Guyot's words, terrorized and traumatized by the activists' show of disapproval, which reportedly involved neither urine nor rats, just the standard fair lies, threats, and histrionics. The victims of this depressing spectacle are the very pediatric patients the research was designed to inform, which makes for another stark reminder that we can't expect anyone to risk anything on behalf of our kids. I'm not saying the world is against us. It's not. Rather, that the world has almost no clue what we've been going through. The reasons for that include the reporting embargo that deserves another whole speech, but had to at least be noted. I'll go home Monday to a life that's meaningful and happy, if a bit lonelier than it used to be. The friends who can't tolerate any challenge to the belief bundle may not be the people we need in our lives at this moment, though it strains comprehension that belief in the literal facts of life is, for some, a bridge too far. There are people for whom the word judgment is useful mainly as a form of social currency that can be wielded to punish critical thinking and marginalize anyone suspected of it. But the friends who can hear you, and the ones you make going forward, will be people for whom the word judgment connotes a cognitive gift that enables critical thinking. Trust me on this, you won't want to go back. Whether or not you ever succeed in opening a single mind is secondary to preserving your own sanity and integrity, and for that, the only prescription is to heed the words that animate this gathering, live not by lies, and know you're not alone. Thank you so much.