The Real Risks of Gender Education

On creating fragile children

Once, when she was younger, my daughter ran screaming from the women’s bathroom at the playground. Breathless, she tried to explain what had happened. “Lady—yelled—boy—” She couldn’t finish, but I understood. A woman was upset that “a boy” was using the girls’ bathroom, then enraged when my daughter—the boy—explained that she was a girl; she couldn’t process that the short-haired child in gym shorts standing before her was female. I rubbed my child’s back and repeated one of our family mottos: “Recover quickly.” But inside, I was shaking. It took me longer to compose myself than it took her.

That would become a recurring theme—the misunderstandings and the need to handle them. The need to make my children better at handling them than I am.

It’s easy for people on the sidelines of this battle or who feel dragged into it unwillingly to be dismayed about the intensity of the cultural focus on bathrooms. There are so many real and pressing problems: housing shortages and inflation and guns and a massive mental health crisis, especially among teens. And yet because of our cultural expectation of sex-segregated bathrooms, they are often the locus of discomfort and misunderstanding, the place where tempers flare around gender issues. Ask any butch woman and she’ll tell you a story of being treated the way my kid was in the women’s restroom.

Once a kindergartner tried to crawl under the door while my daughter was in the stall at school, to see if she was “really a girl.” It wasn’t the young child’s fault. Like most kids today, she’d had no models of gender nonconformity. She didn’t know that masculine girls and feminine boys existed.

I don’t believe that our current gender revolution has created more space for these naturally gender-nonconforming children. While some advocates of gender-affirming medicine and gender-identity ideology insist they are saving the lives of vulnerable children, in practice much of what’s taught to kids today about gender—especially the conflation of gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—suggests to masculine girls and feminine boys that they need to “fix” themselves through medical or psychological interventions that have some irreversible effects, without guaranteed benefits.

There are many possible reasons why this is happening, including the lobbying efforts of transgender and civil rights groups, and the institutional incentives created by federal laws like the recent White House executive order on “affirming care.” But I believe another reason is our national zeitgeist shift toward snowplow parenting, in which parents believe their job is to clear obstacles out of their children’s way rather than to equip them with the skills to navigate those obstacles. We are terrified of our children’s suffering and teach them to be terrified of it, too.

The lessons children are learning about gender in schools, from our culture and on social media, may leave them fragile and thin-skinned, unprepared to withstand pain and conflict and confusion. Take, for instance, misgendering—in the alterworld of Twitter, it’s a worse crime than, say, libeling someone, which is the lifeblood that powers the platform. Children are being taught that misgendering is violence, that every person must be treated exactly as he or she (or they) wishes to be by others or else they’ve experienced discrimination, and that people who violate these rules must be punished, whatever their intent. Children are being taught that feelings are facts. That figurative violence is literal violence.

Most of the time, misgendering means “correctly sexing”—identifying someone by their biological sex, not their gender identity. This can cause a very small percentage of people with intense gender dysphoria deep distress, but doesn’t mean children should learn that they’ve hurt—no, harmed—someone if they misgender them. I don’t want children to be disrespectful, but if they’re disrespected, I don’t want them to melt into a puddle and demand vengeance. I don’t want them to learn that they need to weaken others to feel strong.

Children are learning that sex and sex stereotypes are interchangeable, that rejecting stereotypes means rejecting your body. Or they are not learning about sex stereotypes; the popular gender teaching tool, the Genderbread Person, makes no mention of them. They’re learning that puberty is an aesthetic choice they can make based on their level of discomfort; they are learning that discomfort cannot be withstood.

Once, I took my daughter to a concert, and the woman sitting next to us leaned over, smiling, and said, “I used to take my son to concerts when he was little too. Isn’t it fun?”

“Oh, this is my daughter,” I said. “But, yes, it’s fun.” Her posture changed. She zipped up with discomfort. It wasn’t her fault. People are discomfited by a person they can’t slot neatly into a box because their brains are designed to categorize. She suffered an attack of cognitive dissonance and couldn’t recover. She made a lot of birdlike noises and then moved.

After that, we made a policy not to correct any strangers. If someone gets it wrong, you shrug or laugh to yourself. If the person is going to be part of our lives, we gently correct them while smiling. It’s a little extra work, but it’s not that big a deal. I am trying to change the world to better understand children like mine, but I am also trying to teach my children to navigate the world as it is, not the world as I want it to or think it should be.

Instead of learning how to navigate discomfort, what we have now is a generation of nonbinary children—the vast majority of them female—who are identifying out of their sex. Looking to discard their femaleness, these kids are rejecting names or pronouns that are culturally associated with femininity, in the process reifying gender stereotypes by treating objects and words as if they had an innate connection to femaleness rather than just a culturally imposed meaning. Some nonbinary kids I interviewed would never have worn anything pink or purple when they identified as girls. It was only after they ceased to identify as girls that they felt free to partake of them.

Is this progress, or is this continuing the lengthy cultural project of devaluing the feminine? Is this teaching children to withstand pain, to tolerate difficulty, or is it teaching them that they must change themselves to be themselves, that the authentic can only be attained by artificial interventions? These are my worries. And I fear not just for the organically nonconforming children who emerge this way early in childhood, but also for the teenagers with no such history who are so desperate to wriggle free from their pain and discomfort that they’ll do anything. Anything. I fear for an entire generation, dysphoric or not.

I know how that desperation feels. If there is one thing I’ve learned after a lifetime of trying to avoid emotional pain, it’s that the only release from suffering comes from facing it. I have viewed the world through the lens of victimization that many children are now being taught, and I am desperate to give them another way of seeing the world, one that affords them more power over their own lives.

When I interviewed dozens of women who’d been gender-nonconforming girls for my book Tomboy, I discovered something amazing. Far from internalizing their nonconformity as a form of victimhood, the vast majority of these girls had what seemed to me a startling level of self-confidence. I chalked this up to a) being reared with or as boys, who are socialized to believe in themselves, and/or b) getting used to following their own paths and being different from the others. In other words, they developed a strong sense of themselves and, accordingly, thick skin. They had to keep marching in the direction of their own true north in a world that tried to pull them toward a different pole.

These women all had such similar origin stories and such diverse adulthoods: A few transitioned, many came out as lesbians, some were straight women. The more space we leave for these kids who are different than their peers, and the more we teach them to navigate difficult terrain, the more chance that they will grow up to be resilient adults who are confident in their own choices. Pushing them to be afraid of their difference, or to medicate it, doesn’t provide such space.

I don’t want children to suffer—of course not. But I think that the futile attempt to avoid all suffering only causes more of it. I want us to teach children to accept suffering as a condition of being alive (yes, I realize this idea is 2,000 years old—I’m not taking credit for it), to normalize pain and struggle, to tell them that it’s okay to feel terrible without needing to fix it immediately.

I am not claiming to be good at parenting or unsympathetic to pain. I’ve spent most of my time alive on the planet trying and failing to avoid pain and, in the process, barely developing my own fortitude. That’s why I desperately want my children to be better at it.