What I Have In Common With Trans Activists

Emotional pain can make you desperate to try to reshape reality. I know because I've been there and done that.

This week on The Unspeakable podcast, I interviewed the writer, editor, and book coach Ruby Warrington. Ruby has a toehold in many areas, but the occasion for her being on the podcast was her new book about voluntary childlessness, Women Without Kids. 

Part of what made the conversation so good is that Ruby is unapologetically honest about her personal relationship to the subject. Since it’s one I’ve been closely associated with for a long time (I was a guest on Ruby’s “Women Without Kids” podcast late last year), there was a lot of ground to cover. But there was one area we didn’t really wander into that I wanted to try to tease apart here. This area can be found at the (pardon me) intersection of the childless-by-choice issue and the even more fraught issue known, for lack of a better term, as the whole gender thing.

I’m often asked why I’m so captivated by the effects of the new gender movement. The short answer is, How can anyone not be? In the pantheon of grand psychosocial displacement events, I can’t think of a richer and more labyrinthine tapestry than this one. The longer explanation is too long to go into here, but by way of isolating one particular segment of that explanation, I’ll say this: when I see the way many gender-dysphoric young people can get maniacally focused on transitioning, often to the exclusion of just about everything else, there’s a piece of me that understands on a visceral level where they’re coming from.

That is to say, I get how personal pain can lead to a life of obsessive confirmation bias.

When it comes to being in a frame of mind in which nothing but the obsessed-upon subject is allowed entry into the brain; when it comes to spending nearly every waking moment searching the internet for stories that echo your own story (and shielding your eyes from those that don’t); when it comes to making a full-time job of showing everyone around you how great your life is because, unlike them, you know how to live authentically and not like some conventional normie Basic—guess what? I get it. That’s because there was once a time in my life when I was so filled with angst about an aspect of my identity that I literally couldn’t think about anything else. 

It was the time when I was coming to terms with the fact that I’d never wanted kids and wasn’t going to change my mind.

I was in my early 40s and recently married. Yes, this is a relatively advanced age at which to be a newlywed, much less be grappling with the question of eleventh-hour parenthood, but being a holdout on anything related to domesticity (except the actual buying of a house, which I was determined to do before 35) had always been a point of pride. Although my husband and I had started off equally ambivalent about having kids, the early years of our marriage had pushed us toward a certain clarity. Unfortunately, it was in opposite directions. My husband realized he wanted to be a parent. I realized I did not. 

Because our marriage was at stake—and because there were subtler, more pernicious problems that were not nearly as easy to articulate as this one—I set about trying to talk myself into wanting to be a mother. This involved a lot of mind games wherein I told myself I’d send the kid for long stints at summer camp before starting boarding school at age 10. When eventually I was forced to admit that on the deepest, most cellular level, I’d never wanted to be a mother and never would, I entered a new phase. In today’s parlance, you might call it a “cope.” I set about trying to talk everyone into believing that not having kids was not only a morally superior way of being but an extremely common way of being. In fact, not wanting kids might be just as common (if not more so!) as wanting kids. We just didn’t realize as much, because societal judgment kept most people from being their true selves. Though not for long—a revolution was coming.

Sound familiar? These are the kinds of things you hear from trans activists, especially the ones who insist that the massive spike in trans identification among young people is a naturally occurring phenomenon. There’s no social contagion, they say. Trans people have existed since the beginning of human civilization; they just haven’t been able to come out until now because of oppressive patriarchal norms that reinforced the myth of a gender binary. Meanwhile, young people experiencing gender dysphoria (the real kind or the aspirational kind) fall down Reddit and Tumblr holes so deep there’s no trace of light left when they look up. Invigorated by their persecution complexes, they are nonetheless “exhausted” by everything in the world that does not reflect their own image back to them. Pretty soon, they’re not living in the real world but in a walled city of their own confirmation bias. 

I lived in this city for several years in my early 40s. It was a lonely place, which is saying something since I spent a lot of time insisting that it was a bustling metropolis, brimming with vivacious, fully evolved people who’d cracked the code to a happy life by not having kids. Never mind that most of these people lived on subreddits with names like r/childfree. Never mind that I fed my confirmation bias by typing things like “I regret having kids” into Google and reading post after heartbreaking post from anonymous parents whose abusive partners and/or high-needs children had handed them life sentences of hard, thankless labor compounded by guilt, shame, and constant financial strain. 

Because I focused on these stories and blocked out all the normal happy stories (including those told by my own friends who enjoyed being parents and were living perfectly fulfilled—if temporarily sleep-deprived—lives), I became certain that any given parent had at least a 50 percent chance of ending up with a child whose debilitating mental or physical health issues would effectively imprison him or her for life. From there, I extrapolated that anyone who was single and searching for a partner with whom to start a family was engaged in a socially engineered scavenger hunt fueled by mass delusion. In a display of myopia that astonishes me to this day, I even took part in a public “debate” with some researchers from the National Marriage Project in which (as best as I can recall) I argued that early marriage was bad for society because people change and grow over time, and isn’t it better if a mature tree meets another mature tree and they grow old together in the forest than if two young trees get together too soon and grow into a tangled mess?

I definitely lost the debate, though at the time I was pretty sure it was at least a tie. Afterward, one of my opponents came up and said, “You made some interesting points, but you seem to be forgetting that most people want to have children, so they can’t wait until they’re old to get married.” 

He was right. I’d forgotten that entirely. 

Here’s the part where you start to suspect that the lady doth protest too much. It would follow, after all, that the reason for my defensiveness and selective hearing was that deep down I actually longed to have kids but feared it was too late. Anyone observing my behavior during those years might have understandably concluded that I was grieving the loss of potential motherhood and, consciously or not, channeling my pain into an almost perverse denial of reality. 

They would have been half-right. I was grieving, but it wasn’t over not being a mother. It was over losing my marriage. Although my husband and I were dear friends and in accord on many fronts, it had become increasingly clear that our marriage didn’t have the legs to go the distance. Moreover, if he truly wanted kids and I truly didn’t, we would need to cut our losses sooner rather than later. For this, I felt inconsolably guilty. That guilt, layered on top of the slow drip of impending divorce, had turned me into a deranged evangelist for a non-existent (or at least pretty niche) cause. In my obsession, I even embarked on a book project wherein I commissioned essays from writers who’d chosen not to have kids. (Sometimes obsession has its upsides.) 

I’m not suggesting that this experience lines up neatly with the fanaticism we see in aspects of the gender movement. These are two very different kinds of issues. And make no mistake, I’m certainly not saying that gender dysphoria itself isn’t real. What I am saying is that I know what it is to be in pain and to try to quell that pain by convincing yourself that half-truths—or even non-truths—are facts. In my case, the half-to-non-truth was that the “joy of parenthood” was a sham and people who bought into it were suckers who were secretly envious of my life.

Moreover, because I felt so alone in my pain, I was determined to construct a world in which there were not only lots of other people like me but vastly more people than is commonly recognized. Like gender activists who insist that the only reason we didn’t seen more trans people in the past is that the world wasn’t safe for them, I desperately wanted to believe that the only reason most people had kids was because society forced them into it.

That might be a little tiny bit true, but of course it’s mostly not true. The majority of people, women and men alike, want to be parents. People like me, who genuinely don’t feel the urge to procreate, may have been slightly overlooked historically, but we are still outliers. And guess when I was able to admit that? As soon as my marriage was over and the whole question of having children was removed from my life’s equation. I might have still been in pain from the divorce, but the cease-fire on this particular issue provided instant relief. Before I knew it, the entire subject had dropped off my emotional radar.

Since then, I’ve devoted very little thought to my status as a never-parent. Unless I’m being interviewed on a podcast about my book (which, funnily enough, was a New York Times bestseller on the “child care and parenting” list), it rarely comes up. I have no urge to make a case for there being lots of people like me out there, and in fact have registered some concern about the U.S. population falling below the replacement rate (though I’m not quite sure how concerned to be about that). 

As it turns out, I like being an outlier. Even better, I like forgetting that I’m an outlier. When someone asks if I have kids, I’m almost always taken by surprise, as if they’re asking if I have parakeets or a timeshare in Aruba. If I were still in distress over this issue, I might experience that question as a microaggression. I might feel “othered,” even if I’d never use that word. But now it’s just another moment of chitchat. My life isn’t a movement or a revolution; it’s just my life. 

Oh, the banality of it all! I feel lucky to have gotten to this place. I also feel obliged to recognize that so many of the mental contortions and attempts to reroute reality that we see in trans activism are not expressions of genuine ideological commitment as much as emanations from a bottomless well of emotional pain. When you’re terrified of acknowledging yourself as an outlier, you’ll do anything to create a new norm, including pointing to an obvious fiction and insisting that it’s a fact. 

Take it from the person who spent years trying to make a case against human reproduction as a default biological imperative. Or actually, maybe don’t. The way things are going, I may turn out to be right about that.