An open letter to a runner

Dear…,

I read with interest your experience of public criticism and shaming in the Guardian after your victory last month in the Prep League Finals girls’ 400-meter race. I’m truly sorry for the state of social media, which is frequently vicious and dehumanizing.

You are fully entitled to believe yourself to be a girl. If you’re like most other boys who think they’re girls from a very young age, I suspect that you were an effeminate little boy whose parents allowed you to engage in the fantasy play of preschoolers. Maybe they played along with you, concretizing what for most children is a phase into an “identity.”

In the United States, we’re blessed with a First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that guards our liberty of speech, belief, and association. No one can compel us to say something we believe is false or to join a movement with which we disagree. An important lesson of growing up is that we’re all powerless to control the thoughts or speech of those around us. Just as you’re entitled to think of yourself however you like, so everyone else in the world is entitled to think and speak of you as they prefer. You may have to live with what you perceive as hostile or even vicious comments from others.

I suspect that your parents took you to see all the best specialists, who told them that you were at risk of self-harm or suicide if they didn’t use your chosen name and sex markers. Perhaps they were terrified that this was true. Or maybe they celebrated your special status as a “transgender child” as they allowed your natural puberty to be stunted. And why wouldn’t you believe the adults in your life? They clearly have all the answers and have the best of connections to the finest gender-affirming care for you.

You don’t want to hear this, but Lina, you are not a girl. You are a fourteen-year-old boy whose growth has been thwarted by powerful hormones, which may sterilize you and cause your penis to remain childlike. But girls are not boys whose puberty has been blocked, or boys with breast implants. Girls are not boys with small penises. Girls don’t have to take estrogen to go through their natural puberty to grow breasts and start their periods. They don’t have to take drugs to ovulate or conceive and bear children. They’re just girls who grow up to be women, as you are a boy who will grow up to be a man.

Everyone is born with a sex. None of us gets to choose it. We all have to live within the boundaries of what God or nature gives us. You might as well rail against heaven for having to breathe oxygen or eat nutritious food. It’s just the hardware you were born with as a male mammal. You are boy, and you will be a man soon—and that’s something to celebrate! It’s neither unkind nor hateful for other people to state this fact.

You currently are a very healthy and athletic boy—I urge you not to throw away the great gift of health and strength that you’ve been given. Please reconsider the medicalized pathway you’re on, which will likely end with you undergoing unnecessary cosmetic surgery and taking dangerous, life-shortening cross-sex hormones.

Like your transgender identity when you were a preschooler, I suspect that your essay in the Guardian was drafted and edited by your parents. Most fourteen-year-old boys, even at the best of private schools, don’t write with the passion or confidence of that essay, which does a tremendous job of articulating the extreme transgender policy preference on boys in girls and women’s sports. It’s personal and works effectively to humanize you. You’ll be able to write that way yourself eventually if you give yourself over to the process of growing up naturally. Learning to write takes time, attention, and lots and lots of rough drafts. Growing up is the same, with lots of mistakes and false starts.

As you’re still a teenager, I know that it’s difficult if not impossible for you to take the long view of life. But I urge you to consider what you want for yourself at age 20, 30, 40, and beyond. You come from a very distinguished family, so you must have some ambition to achieve something yourself. What do you most want to accomplish as an adult? Do you want to become a brilliant scientist, an astronaut or inventor, a physician or lawyer, a pastor, or a philosopher or literary scholar? Do you want to become a parent and raise children of your own? All of these achievements require your full health and strength in your early and middle years. These are the kinds of adult achievements that build on themselves only after years of study or effort. Beginning or continuing a medical pathway now will make these adult achievements much less likely for you.

An old cliché goes something like this: “the best time to have turned around was five- or ten hours/months/years ago. The next best time is right now.” You have the gift of youth and health now—please don’t waste them on an impossible dream. There are so many more realistic dreams you can achieve if you only return to what you know is true.

Signed,

The mother of a desister