I write crime fiction but for many years I wrote children's and YA books, and for ten of those years I belonged to a very close-knit online writers' group of about fifteen kids authors. One of the authors had a trans kid - an autistic girl with mental health problems who identified as a boy. We were all very supportive of the mother's efforts to secure gender-affirming care. At this point, I considered myself - vaguely - to be a trans ally, of the "be kind" sort.
I’m a mom living this literal hell and culturally sanctioned abuse towards both my daughter and myself. Thank you for realizing something is terribly wrong.
The horrid thing is that sooner or later, the TRA Purity Test comes to any group not made up of established close RL friends. Somebody has a "trans" child, or somebody turns trans and you either affirm something you disagree with - perhaps making you complicit in the compromising of things intended for women - or end up on the wrong end of a firehose of genderwang talking points made even less coherent by the gravity of the swelling Omnicause.
It turns out you're not just a sex realist, you're a colonialist white supremacist who's literally repeating heteropatriarchal genocide through words which cause real harm. The R word hangs in the air as a threat.
These are your friends. You thought they were smart. Suddenly this.
So, you're on the back foot (and I'm not convinced writers are at our best unrehearsed and in real-time anyway), and you can't win the argument, because the other side isn't coherent. It's a chain of mottes and baillies.
Years later, you find yourself reading articles and listening to podcasts, gathering arguments, cheering on developments like the Cass Review... but it's like learning karate to win that playground fight you lost as a kid.
You can't have that rematch anyway, not with the hammer of Cancel Culture hanging over you and yours, well beyond the literary sphere. The irony is that the sex realists are usually the ones with the most to lose because we are grounded in the real.
In any case, nothing will bring back the friends you invested time and life in.
You can, however, crawl off and quietly find a less captured literary ecosystem and hope to make some new more reality-based friends.
You are so good at their victimized language. A good chuckle.
I’m a mom living this literal hell and culturally sanctioned abuse towards both my daughter and myself. Thank you for realizing something is terribly wrong.
The horrid thing is that sooner or later, the TRA Purity Test comes to any group not made up of established close RL friends. Somebody has a "trans" child, or somebody turns trans and you either affirm something you disagree with - perhaps making you complicit in the compromising of things intended for women - or end up on the wrong end of a firehose of genderwang talking points made even less coherent by the gravity of the swelling Omnicause.
It turns out you're not just a sex realist, you're a colonialist white supremacist who's literally repeating heteropatriarchal genocide through words which cause real harm. The R word hangs in the air as a threat.
These are your friends. You thought they were smart. Suddenly this.
So, you're on the back foot (and I'm not convinced writers are at our best unrehearsed and in real-time anyway), and you can't win the argument, because the other side isn't coherent. It's a chain of mottes and baillies.
Years later, you find yourself reading articles and listening to podcasts, gathering arguments, cheering on developments like the Cass Review... but it's like learning karate to win that playground fight you lost as a kid.
You can't have that rematch anyway, not with the hammer of Cancel Culture hanging over you and yours, well beyond the literary sphere. The irony is that the sex realists are usually the ones with the most to lose because we are grounded in the real.
In any case, nothing will bring back the friends you invested time and life in.
You can, however, crawl off and quietly find a less captured literary ecosystem and hope to make some new more reality-based friends.