Our family’s journey began on Easter Sunday more than a decade ago. We had recently joined the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, and that morning was worse than the usual fire drill. Frankly, we were just hoping to make it before the end of service.

In the middle of the chaos, my two-and-a-half-year-old was channeling Jackie Chan. Squirrel-like hops. Acrobatics. Kicks that occasionally landed cleanly. My wife was trying to get the kids into matching dresses they had worn a couple months earlier for a school picture. His sister was only too happy to comply.

Jacq, on the other hand, was not. He claimed that the dress was not his and refused to put it on. In fact, he refused to wear any of his clothes that looked like “girl clothes,” which was most of them at the time. My wife even tried showing him the school picture of him in the dress, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

We ended up pivoting to Plan B, which was a desperate search through all his clothes to find something gender neutral. We settled on sweatpants, a t-shirt, and tennis shoes.

My son is seventeen now. But in my mind’s eye, I can still see him as that little boy unabashedly making his way down the aisle in the middle of Easter Service. His awkwardly authentic stride. The frumpy t-shirt-sweatpants-sneakers ensemble, like he’d just escaped from an orphanage. Oliver Twist, with swagger. This, in contrast to his sister half-skipping, half-dancing her way down. Lacey spring dress, bright white shoes, pony-tailed hair bouncing with every step. Not exactly how we scripted it, but they were both happy.

That’s kind of been his life up to this point. Happy when he can just be his authentic self. But there is the flip side, too. He has had to witness adults expressing their outrage at school board meetings to protest the reading of a children’s book about a trans kid — a kid just like him. And he has spoken at those meetings alongside his sister, with a composure that puts the people opposing him to shame.

That moment, looking back, was foreshadowing. The first visible signal of what we now know as gender dysphoria. The persistent, profound, insistent distress that occurs when a person’s gender identity does not match the body they were assigned. It would turn his world upside down over the next two years.

In that Easter morning moment, my son had a better grasp of an engineering principle than most of the adults in the room — including me. If the model doesn’t match the data, it’s time to change the model. He was telling us. We just had to start listening.

Around the time he turned three, he started asking me when he was going to get his peanut. That was his word for penis. We learned from his daycare provider that whenever the teachers called for boys to line up for the bathroom, he consistently stood up with the boys. He was already, in his own three-year-old way, trying to make sense of why his body did not match what he knew about himself.

I tried, badly at first, to explain. At one point I said, “Think of it this way — on the inside you’re a boy, but on the outside you’re a girl.” He nodded. A few days later, he came back to it. “No,” he said. “That’s not right. I’m a boy on the inside and on the outside.” He was right. I was the one who needed to work harder. Because of course he is a boy, inside and out. Just because he doesn’t have the parts that other boys typically have doesn’t mean he’s not a boy through and through. He has a variation of a boy’s body that is less common. That’s why it’s described as dysphoria.

Around the same time, his daycare teachers noticed how much he hated the length of his hair, which he kept saying made him look like a girl. They became some of the strongest advocates for the haircut he wanted, even arranging for one of their colleagues to cut it once we gave the green light. Right after the cut they noticed he didn’t seem as happy as they expected. They asked him about it. He shook his head. Still too long. They went back. The buzzcut did the trick. His teacher told us, and I’m quoting, “It was the happiest I had ever seen him.”

I doubt I will ever be able to put into words how despondent our son had become from the dysphoria. All I can tell you is that it was a matter of life and death. Maybe not right then. Maybe not in a year. But at some point in his young life. Our decision to affirm his identity was made to keep him alive. We would rather have a child who is alive and happy, than a child who takes his own life because we refused to learn and grow ourselves.

After we affirmed his identity, it was like a light switch. He went from despair to a happy kid who couldn’t wait to go to school.

By the time he entered kindergarten, his principal — Craig McCalla of Cornerstone Elementary in Dexter, Michigan — had no prior experience with transgender students, but was completely committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment. Craig assured us, in his words, that his job was to provide a safe and supportive environment for every one of his students. Because all means all. It didn’t make a bit of difference whether we were talking about learning challenges, physical disabilities, mental health challenges, or gender dysphoria. He worked tirelessly with educators throughout the district and across the state, sharing what he learned about creating safe, inclusive environments for LGBTQ students. When the district expanded its elementary schools, he took the lead in designing gender-neutral bathrooms — safer, more private facilities that benefited every kid.

My son later described the experience of those years to a Detroit News reporter as “pretty normal. I was treated like every other kid.” That normalcy, so hard-won, so valuable, is now the target of a coordinated legislative campaign across the United States.

To understand that campaign, you have to understand that it did not originate from parents concerned about their children’s wellbeing, or from physicians uncertain about the evidence, or from legislators wrestling with complex policy questions. It originated from a specific political calculation made around 2014 by conservative political operatives in Houston, Texas. Public attitudes on homosexuality were shifting rapidly. Anti-discrimination legislation was advancing. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, in particular, drew the operatives’ attention because of its provisions allowing transgender people to use facilities matching their gender identity.

A local lawyer named Jared Woodfill and a local right-wing radio host, Steven Hotze, hatched what became the template for the entire national anti-trans movement. They launched a fear-mongering advertising campaign that branded transgender people as sexual predators — specifically, as men who would dress as women to gain access to bathrooms where they could assault children.

This claim had no factual basis. None. Law enforcement across states that had adopted trans-inclusive policies reported no increase in bathroom-related assaults. The evidence against the claim was available, unambiguous, and utterly irrelevant to the campaign — because the campaign was never about evidence. It was about fear. And as Arie Kruglanski’s research on the need for cognitive closure would predict, fear is extraordinarily effective at overriding the desire to examine evidence carefully.

The Houston experiment worked well enough to be replicated. North Carolina passed a similar bathroom bill. Republican-sponsored legislation targeting transgender people spread across the country. And when the bathroom narrative proved legally and factually untenable — North Carolina’s law was eventually repealed after significant economic consequences — the operatives regrouped and refocused on a more vulnerable target. Transgender children. Gender-affirming care was reframed not as evidence-based medicine but as chemical castration. As sexual mutilation of children. Parents who supported their transgender children’s medical care were cast as abusers. Physicians who provided that care were threatened with criminal prosecution.

The new wedge issue, by 2022, was sports. Trans female athletes. Sports holds a uniquely powerful place in most cultures, easily rivaling religion. It is a topic that lies at the intersection of healthy competition, fairness, and passion, governed by rules that are essentially negotiated. It is not an issue where the arguments translate directly to a person’s right to exist. Which is exactly why it works as a wedge.

Sports legislation is being used as a Trojan Horse to pass legislation that bans gender-affirming health care, bathroom use based on identity, even the mention of trans lives in public school settings. There are historical parallels here. Black athletes were banned from sports participation based purely on the color of their skin, masked with pseudo-scientific arguments. Those false arguments were then extended to justify the continued denial of equitable health care, public accommodation, education, employment, transportation. It is the same maneuver.

This is the mechanism of manufactured certainty at its most cynical. The genuine complexity of gender — the fact that biological sex involves chromosomes, hormones, and anatomy that do not always align, the fact that gender identity has neurological and psychological dimensions that science continues to study — all of that complexity was erased and replaced with a false binary. Normal children being harmed by a radical ideological agenda. That binary was not discovered. It was constructed. And it was constructed specifically because complexity does not mobilize a voting base.

Let me bring you back to the science. The biology of sex is not binary. This is not a controversial claim in biology. It is established fact. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental biologist at Brown University, has documented that intersex conditions affect between 1.7 and 4 percent of the population, depending on how intersex is defined. That is millions of people. The existence of this population is not a political statement. It is a biological datum. The binary the law is trying to enforce is not a feature of nature that legislators are merely acknowledging. It is a simplification of nature that serves a social function.

Gender identity is also not binary. A 2021 study in *Pediatrics* found that approximately 2 percent of high school students identify as transgender or nonbinary. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School estimates approximately 1.6 million Americans aged thirteen and older identify as transgender. These are not ideological inventions. They are the self-reports of human beings describing their own experience.

And the medical evidence on what happens when those self-reports are taken seriously — versus when they are denied or criminalized — is unambiguous. The 2022 Tordoff study in *JAMA Network Open* found that access to gender-affirming care was associated with a 60 percent lower odds of depression and a 73 percent lower odds of suicidality among transgender youth. The Trevor Project’s research consistently finds that having even one accepting adult — a parent, a teacher, a counselor — is associated with dramatically reduced rates of suicidal ideation. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ 2018 policy statement reviewed the evidence and concluded that gender-diverse children supported in their gender identity have improved well-being compared to those who are not supported.

This is the consensus that legislation is overriding. Not with better evidence. With manufactured certainty. In 2023 alone, twenty-two states enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors. The people who passed those laws did not, for the most part, sit with parents of transgender children. They did not consult the medical organizations that had spent decades developing the standards of care. They listened to a political movement that had identified transgender children as a useful focal point for the mobilization of fear.

My son is seventeen now. By all appearances, my son is a boy. And yet, he now enters adulthood being painfully aware that he is not entitled to the same individual liberties, the same civil rights, the same human rights as his peers. He has the personal experience of being denied gender-affirming care at one of the premier hospital systems in the world — the University of Michigan Medical Center — because Trump’s executive order to withhold federal funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care has been tragically effective, even at an institution that has been at the forefront of such care.

This disconnect — between the actual lives of transgender young people and the political construction of them as a threat — is not accidental. It is the point. The anti-trans movement is not, at its core, about transgender children. It is about the defense of a certainty — the certainty of a fixed, binary gender order — that transgender people, simply by existing, disturb. The same psychological mechanism that drives racial hierarchy drives this. The need for the categories to be clear, stable, God-ordained.

There is a photograph I think about often. Elizabeth Eckford, age fifteen, walking alone toward Little Rock Central High School on September 4th, 1957. A white mob behind her. The face of a white girl her own age contorted in hatred. Eckford had done nothing except show up. The mob did not see a fifteen-year-old trying to attend school. They saw the disruption of a certainty they had organized their entire world around.

That photograph records what happens when a society decides that a certain category of human beings constitutes a threat. Not because of anything they have done. Because of who they are.

I think about that photograph every time I see one of these kids testify. The posture is the same. The composure is the same. The willingness to keep walking is the same. Today’s attacks on transgender children deploy the same three instruments that sustained segregation. Religion. Nationalism. Fear. The specific accusations are different — grooming instead of amalgamation, gender ideology instead of race mixing — but the underlying structure is identical. The faces in the mob change. The expression does not.

This is what children know. They know when adults are manufacturing. They know when adults are being honest. They know who among the adults is afraid. And they know, always, which side the evidence of their own existence is on.

I have watched my son navigate this entire thing with a psychological composure that many of the adults opposing him cannot muster. He is, very simply, better at this than they are. More informed. More precise. More honest. More rooted.

If I could get the adults who hold power in this country to have one conversation with one of these kids — a real conversation, not a policy-page hypothetical — the manufactured certainty would, in many of them, crumble. Because kids don’t perform certainty. They live. And when you sit with them, you see that the certainty you have been sold about their lives is unsupportable.

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