Maybe?

Response to a "friend"

The following might very well be the last communication I have with a friend of almost 18 years. Our children grew up together.  The night her youngest child was born, I stayed at her house and drove her children to school the next morning. She saw my daughter fall down the dark hole of trans identity practically overnight. My husband and I spent untold hours trying to explain everything to her, especially when I saw pronouns in her signatures and when she would nonchalantly talk about her children’s trans friends. Almost a year ago, everything blew up, and then when my birthday came around this August, I got a card from her that did not delve into any of the specifics of our conflict, but as always stayed on the surface, reminiscing about our past closeness. I sent this to her in reply:

Sorry for the long time to respond but I was delayed for several reasons: because I went out of town soon after receiving your card; because I have been consumed by writing a paper I’ve been invited to present at a SEGM conference in Greece in early October; and because, most deeply, I just don’t understand what you hope for.  Nor do I know what is even possible.

What is it you miss in me?  Who is it you think of fondly?  Because everything that I communicated to you (and I have repeatedly reread it all) IS me.  Not just the me that has had to suit up to fight for my daughter, but the me that has always been — a critical thinker who values discussion and debate and honesty and deep conviction.  

When I said maybe we should try to keep gender-fucking-nightmare-bullshit out of our friendship because I could sense that you had different thoughts you weren’t sharing, AND BECAUSE I DIDN’T WANT IT TO INTERFERE AND DESTROY ANOTHER PART OF MY LIFE, you said no, that it would not be a real friendship for you not to discuss it, and that you wanted to be there for me.  Also, that you wanted me to question you on your thoughts.  So I did.  I asked you questions each time I got an email with your pronouns in the signature, each time you started to say something and then backed off, “moving on” or “forgetting” what it was you were thinking anyway.

And each time, when you consistently only replied that all of my questions were “hurting you,” I took a huge proverbial and actual breath, and sometimes let it go, and sometimes pushed through a bit, and then, one time, said that what you seemed not to be saying was making me wonder if I could even be friends anymore.  I was inviting you to say something, anything, like, “You’re right, I’m not being true to what I said I wanted to keep doing, and I am making this about me, and I haven’t really told you why I have pronouns in my signature or that I believe in "true trans" or that I find it easier to support my other friends who are “transing” their kids,” or I don’t even know what else because you never said anything I could actually use to understand you.  That’s when you instead blew up and insulted me and told me this was my “thing” and not your “thing,” that I don’t know your kids and you don’t know mine, and that I’m a terrible listener and self-righteous and condescending.

So, I guess my questions now are really, “Why?” and “What?"  Why might you still want to be friends?  What do you even value in me?  Because while this fight to save my daughter and other children from drug addiction, body mutilation, and deep psychological harm has threatened to, and almost did, destroy me, it has also just concentrated and crystallized the most inherent parts of me that any true friend would value instead of vilifying.

You reacted so strongly to the idea that I was demanding agreement with me, while you, on the other hand, value differences in friendships or even just friendships that allow for differences.  I tried to say two things.  One, that this issue is causing too much harm in the world, and I see it too clearly for it to be a “let’s agree to disagree” topic, much like gun control might be for our mutual friend, and that, two, you weren’t even being honest enough with me to let me know that you disagreed or with what you did disagree.

If you really see me as someone who is inherently so self-righteous that no one can disagree with me and remain my friend, there’s just nothing more that I can say.

But when another female athlete gets pummeled by a man, when another detransitioner mourns not being able to feed her child from the breasts the world told her it was right to amputate before she knew that someday she would even want to have that child, when other parents and therapists like me help more young people avoid medical horrors by realizing what their distress was actually about, and these desisters try to tell their stories and ask the adults to stop encouraging this abuse, and any of this crosses your radar, maybe you’ll think differently about me.