Pass the Tequila

I'll stop drinking when she stops transing.

The thing with my daughter’s generation, her culture of celebrating everything that makes her a special misfit—the ADD, the trans thing of course, and whatever else she advertises on her Twitter bio—has also deemed me special in her eyes. She and her older brother think I’m an alcoholic. Thought I was anyway. And I believed them for a while, long enough to give up drinking for over 800 days. It was probably right around the time my daughter’s name change and the they/them pronouns made their way into our home that I decided, fuck it. I’m having a glass of wine. And I haven’t looked back since.

Because once five o’clock rolls around, I need to turn my brain off. I teach during the day part-time and with the rest of my time, I delve deep into the trans issue. My husband and son worry that as much as my daughter is being radicalized, that I am radicalizing myself. They are waiting for me to saunter into the living room wearing a Maga hat maybe. Or quoting Ben Shapiro. And I get it. I am an obsessive person. When I get hooked on something, I get what my daughter taught me is a “hyperfixation.” And when my kid’s health, safety and future are concerned, there is simply no stopping me. Call me OCD and put me on a spectrum. I’m fine with it.

I listen to podcasts—Calmversations, Gender: A Wider Lens, Joe Rogan, Heterodorx, Woman By Definition, Identity Crisis, Feminist Current, Transparency, Real Talk with Zuby. I read books—Irreversible Damage, Trans, T, Material Girls, The End of Gender, Galileo’s Middle Finger… Oh and the YouTube channels: Blaire White, Arielle Scarcella, Magdalen Berns, Gender Dysphoria Alliance… I mean not all at once, obviously. But by dusk, I am DONE. And it feels good to numb my brain for the evening, on frozen margaritas that I whip up in the factory-refurbished Vitamix that was worth. Every. Penny.

I ventured to post my first comment on a YouTube video as myself this afternoon. I couldn’t take one more minute of being silent on the issue. It was time to add my name to the category “Dissenter”—specifically the issue of teaching the fairytale of trans to school children in New Jersey. The rage I feel. The helplessness. To be up against not only schools but the medical establishment, government, our children, their friends, their friends’ parents, social media, mainstream media, on and on. Pass the fucking tequila.

And I am thinking about taking a meeting at the school, with whoever is in charge of “diversity” or “inclusion”—whoever safeguards the snowflakes. I will let her know that the school is driving a wedge between kids and their parents, due to their eagerness to change my daughter’s name and pronouns on all official school documents without discussing any of it with us—her parents. Because the administration seems to be living in an alternate 1950s reality where all parents of gay and trans children kick them out of the house, and so thereby believe they are protecting the kids, but really what they’re doing is further indoctrinating them and inserting them into an unrelenting machine that will chew them up and spit them out damaged, confused, cut up and sterile.

Because no one wants to be called a bigot? Are you fucking kidding me? You think it’s actually okay to peddle an “everything’s coming up roses” portrait of what a trans life is, without going into any of the possible, probable medical outcomes? There’s no room for any critical perceptions, because God forbid you get called transphobic? God forbid anyone thinks on their own for one second to conclude that maybe the language of the gay rights movement doesn’t actually fit the trans movement. God forbid you have the thought that “conversion therapy,” when applied to trans activists who aim to remove all safeguards from between our children and doctors bloated with scripts for T, Lupron and estrogen doesn’t really add up. God forbid you have a hunch that asking thoughtful questions about twelve year-olds “consenting” to double mastectomies maybe doesn’t equal transphobia, especially when those same tweens cannot legally consent to sex or anything else adult. Can everyone wake the fuck up? Can anyone? Bueller? How many detransitioners do we need before the tide turns? We’re at almost thirty thousand. What do we need? Forty? Fifty? One-hundred thousand?

Ughhhhh.

I have to go drink now.