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.