In September 2021, my child’s third-grade teacher dismissed his class for recess by using some fun way to divide them, with one group going first and the other going second. He did this often, with the identity of the two groups changing based on his mood. He might divide them based on their birthdays or their cookie preferences, or maybe about their opinions of Harry Potter.
On this particular day, he took what he thought was the easy route and divided them by sex: girls would go to recess first, and boys would go second.
He did not realize his prompt created a true crisis of conscience for my child.
A day later, my eight-year-old child came out to their mother and me.
They did it in their typical fashion. We had sent them to bed and were now relaxing on the couch, watching television. My child should have been asleep for at least half an hour, but they came stepping down the stairs in a Hogwarts robe (in Gryffindor colors) with their footie pajamas beneath it. They asked to speak privately with my wife upstairs, and after hemming and hawing, my wife acquiesced and followed them back upstairs.
About fifteen minutes later, my wife came down and told me it was my turn. I sighed, put down my phone, and walked upstairs, where I found my child smiling and kneeling on my bed. As I reached the top step, they slammed their face into the mattress, giddy with excitement. I sat beside them and asked, “What’s up?”
Without taking their face out of the mattress, they said, “I think I’m nonbinary.”
I don’t remember my exact words, but I made it clear I supported any label they claimed for themselves.
I also urged them to be wary of caging themselves behind a label. If, later in life, they started to experience themselves as a boy or girl, I didn’t want them to feel like it was wrong to feel that way, just like it wasn’t wrong to feel nonbinary.
Finally, I acknowledged the power that comes from matching the right word to the right sense, and I told them I hoped they now felt that sense of power.
My eight-year-old looked up at me and said they understood. They hugged and thanked me for being their dad.
During our conversation, they said they wanted to come out because when their teacher had divided the class into boys and girls, they felt distressed by the question and didn’t know which group they belonged to. But here’s the thing: they didn’t want to come out just so their teacher would know they were nonbinary; they wanted to come out so that any other nonbinary students in the class wouldn’t suffer the same stress and anxiety my child had felt.
They came out so they could protect others.
Yesterday, Texas became the most populous state in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for minors. They are the eighteenth state to target children whose gender, like my child’s, does not align with the one assigned to them at birth.
Using data suggested by a 2017 study from the Williams Institute on the age of individuals who identify as transgender in the United States, roughly 48,000 children between the ages of 13 and 17 are affected by these laws.
To put that in perspective, Manhattan has a population density of 66,000 people per square mile. If you were to round up ALL of the gender-non-conforming youth in those eighteen states and box them into one square mile of Manhattan (as I’m sure the politicians in those states would like to do), you would still need to add the entire population of a town the size of Concord, MA, to that one square mile if you wanted it to equal the borough’s current population density.
Still, with the volume of outrage coming from those who seek to limit the gender expression of these kids, you’d think our country was being taken over by a horde of woke parents with rusty knives who are driven to slice off the still-budding breasts and undropped testicles of all the nation’s children.
But the children affected by the laws in these eighteen states comprise less than 0.015% of the country. According to the same study, the entire population of gender-non-coming youth is probably no greater than 0.73% of the country.
The political party behind these laws — the Republican Party — depends on social issues to stir up the energy of its base. Having lost the original battle over segregation in the 1950s and ’60s, they spent the next fifty years continuing to lose on every other major social issue.
In the 1970s, the Supreme Court found in Reed v. Reed that the Fourteenth Amendment protected individuals from being discriminated against based on sex. This was extended in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prevented sex discrimination throughout the education sphere, including school sports, sexual harassment policies, academic opportunities in engineering and the sciences, and discrimination based on pregnancy. It also (and most famously) recognized a federal right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.
With the “Reagan Revolution,” the 1980s offered the conservative counterpunch to the liberal victories of the previous decades. The attempt to pass an Equal Rights Amendment finally failed in the states after having been passed by Congress a decade earlier. Beyond the Reagan administration’s refusal to fight the AIDS epidemic, which was decimating the country’s (and the world’s) gay population, homosexuals suffered another major setback when the Supreme Court upheld a Georgian law criminalizing sodomy in private between consenting adults.
But there were some progressive victories. The power of Congress to extend the Federal minimum wage and overtime pay to state employees through the Fair Labor Standards Act was upheld, as was the right to parody public officials in the media, the right to stage a boycott to enact social changes, the right to burn the American flag in protest, and the right of students to be free from the religious doctrine of creationism in public schools.
The 1990s saw the Supreme Court uphold the fundamental principles of Roe v. Wade, affirming an individual’s right to abortion before fetal viability. The ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey extended the right further by acknowledging that an individual’s decision to undergo an abortion takes place in “a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter.” The verdict invalidated Republican attempts to involve the state in discussions between pregnant individuals and their healthcare providers.
The Court also prevented the state of Colorado from enshrining discrimination against homosexuals in its state constitution, struck down the conservative moralizing of the Internet inherent in the Communications Decency Act and Child Online Protection Act, and prevented public schools from forcing attendees at graduations to listen to religious prayers.
In the 2000s, the Court reaffirmed its finding that the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause prohibits school-sponsored prayer. Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe extended its interpretation of the clause to prohibit student-led and student-initiated prayer that utilizes school-supplied materials (in this case, a loudspeaker at a football game).
It also overruled its earlier decision in the 1980s and determined that all laws that criminalize consensual, same-sex sexual conduct violate an individual’s right to privacy under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Court affirmed the right of homosexuals to receive a marriage license (allowing for civil unions).
In the 2010s, the Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the exclusion of same-sex couples from the right to marry violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, allowing homosexuals to gain all the benefits of marriage.
Despite capturing the legislative agenda of the Republican party, right-wing conservative Christians (a.k.a. “evangelicals”) had been losing in Federal courts for nearly fifty years. Progressives such as myself might be forgiven for claiming that the late 20th-century rise of the religious right was merely the death rattle of conservative America.
After all, demography equals destiny, and more and more children seem to be coming of age in a secular America with a fundamental belief and constitutionally defended notion of equal rights for all.
Unfortunately, as Monty Python tried to teach us, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.
The makeup of the Supreme Court changed drastically during the Trump administration. During his four years in office, President Trump named as many justices to the court as President Obama did during his eight years. Two of those justices (Justice Gorsuch and Justice Coney-Barrett) resulted from anti-democratic maneuverings by the Republican leader in the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell.
In 2016, Sen. McConnell refused to allow a vote on President Obama’s final nominee because, as he said at the time, he didn’t think it was fair to vote on a Supreme Court nominee during a presidential election year. However, when Justice Ginsburg died two months prior to the presidential contest in 2020, Sen. McConnell rushed through the approval process of Justice Coney-Barrett to ensure Justice Ginsburg’s seat was filled by a Republican nominee.
Thanks to Senator McConnell, today’s Supreme Court has a comfortable, conservative majority, even if you discount the predominantly conservative voting record of Chief Justice Roberts, whom arch-conservative critics call a “Republican In Name Only.”
The conservative majority on the Roberts Court has, most famously, struck down its holdings in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declaring that there is no Federal right to an abortion. The decision empowered state legislatures to determine whether a pregnant individual has the right to an abortion and what limits can be placed on that right.
The Roberts Court also dismantled the enforcement mechanisms of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, erasing nearly 60 years of civil rights protections for Black Americans in the hopes of enshrining the power of White politicians for generations to come.
In October, the Court heard the oral arguments in two cases related to affirmative action. The arguments did not differ from those made in earlier cases when the Court upheld the use of race in college admission decisions, but with the new makeup of the court, conservatives have their best chance yet of erasing the policy of affirmative action, not only from education but from housing, government contracting, and employment.
The Roberts Court has also begun to chip away at the wall separating church from state. The football coach at a public high school regularly conducted demonstrative prayers on the 50-yard line of the school’s football field. When the school decided not to renew his contract based on his behavior, he sued them for violating the Free Expression clause under the First Amendment. Even with lower courts supporting the school board’s decision based on the Court’s precedents around the Establishment Clause, the Roberts Court mischaracterized the facts to overturn the lower courts’ rulings. While the majority’s opinion suggests a narrow interpretation of the case, religious supporters see it as a sign of the Court’s willingness to revisit all its decisions on school prayer.
Is it any wonder that Republican politicians are going after transgender rights? Without abortion, racism, or school prayer to stoke the moral outrage of the rubes in the cheap seats, what other moral scapegoat could they use to drive Republican voters out of their pews and into the voting booths?
It doesn’t help that in 2020, 49.5% of white evangelicals believed that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Add to that the fact that President Trump banned transgender individuals from serving in the military, erased gender identity as a basis for sex discrimination in healthcare, and allowed sex-based homeless shelters to deny access to transgender people (and not just those who self-identified as trans, but anyone who the shelter believed may be transgender based on such fool-proof signs as height, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other gender stereotypes).
Suppose God’s anointed messenger says being transgender is a sin, and the Supreme Court has taken away all the other wedge issues. In that case, it only makes sense to concentrate your political party’s incessant propaganda on saving the children.
My ten-year-old child came out as nonbinary because they wanted to protect those who could not speak for themselves. After telling their mother and me about their gender non-conformity, they asked us to speak with their teacher so he would understand the stress he had inadvertently caused to his students.
Since my child came out, over a dozen children in their school have confided to them that they are some flavor of LGBTQIA+. I’m talking about nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old kids here. They come to my child because my wife and I have taught them to be proud of who they are, to stand up for their rights, and to defend themselves against anyone who tries to rob them of their power.
The other students come out to my child because, as my kiddo told me when I questioned the number, “they know I’m safe, Dad.”
Earlier this year, the state of Vermont passed the first law in the nation that explicitly protects healthcare providers from being sued or prosecuted for providing gender-affirming care. This was how my home state told its LGBTQIA+ youth what my child’s behavior told their friends: You’re safe.
My ten-year-old tells their mother and me that they want to be a lawyer when they get older.
I can only dream that they sue these hateful legislatures for violating their children’s right to be and express themselves in every color of the rainbow.
My child’s experiences are nested within a broader socio-political landscape that is downright frightening. The rhetoric and the rulemaking of the Republican party are resistant to change, and our nation is scarred by battles fought in courtrooms and legislative chambers.
While the laws and attitudes we’re currently facing are disheartening, I do not despair. I find immense hope in my child’s resilience and courage. I see it in the way the kids in their school grasp the complexities of sexuality and gender, viewing themselves honestly. Their bravery in accepting and declaring their identities should inspire all of us.
They fuel my motivation to build a society where truth is respected, not rejected. A society where each individual is allowed to explore, understand, and declare their identity without fear of repercussions.
We may not know the next chapter in our nation’s history. But together, we, as parents, teachers, neighbors, and allies, can write it. We must forge ahead with compassion for those different from us and a steadfast commitment to safeguarding each individual’s right to be who they are.