Episode 8: The Gender Binary and the Anxiety of Ambiguity

Our family’s journey began on an Easter Sunday more than a decade ago, with a two-and-a-half-year-old who had channeled Jackie Chan rather than put on a dress. What I saw that morning was not a child performing an ideology. It was a child telling the truth about his experience in the only language he had. This episode is about how I learned to receive that truth honestly — and about the science that changes how you hear the whole story.

I give you the clinical evidence up front, because it’s unambiguous. Gender identity is present and stable from early childhood and is not amenable to social pressure. When a child’s identity is affirmed, outcomes are dramatically better — the variable that produces the difference is not the child, it’s the response of the people around them. The biology of sex is not binary. Gender identity is not binary. The Tordoff study found access to gender-affirming care associated with sharply lower odds of depression and suicidality. For our family, affirming our son’s identity was a decision made to keep him alive.

I also trace where the campaign against transgender children actually came from — not from worried parents or uncertain physicians, but from a specific political calculation made in Houston in 2014, a bathroom-panic template that was replicated nationally and then refocused on the most vulnerable target available: kids. I testified before the Michigan State Board of Education in 2016. I talk about a bill that sought to make my support for my son’s evidence-based medical care a felony punishable by life in prison.

My son is seventeen now. He has navigated all of this with a composure most of the adults opposing him cannot muster. If the people who hold power would have one real conversation with one of these kids, the manufactured certainty would crumble. Because kids don’t perform certainty. They live.

Transcript

Episode 8: The Gender Binary and the Anxiety of Ambiguity

Our family’s journey began on Easter Sunday more than a decade ago. We had recently joined the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, and that morning was worse than the usual fire drill. Frankly, we were just hoping to make it before the end of service.

What I saw on that Easter Sunday was not a child performing an ideology. It was a child telling the truth about his experience in the only language he had available. And what I had to learn — not immediately, but over time, and with the help of a considerable amount of clinical evidence — was how to receive that truth honestly.

Let me give you the science up front, because it changes how you hear the rest of this story. The clinical literature on gender development in children is extensive, and consistent on one point. Gender identity — your internal sense of yourself as a man, a woman, both, or neither — is present and relatively stable from early childhood. It is distinct from gender expression and from sexual orientation. And it is not amenable to change through social pressure. When a child’s gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth, that mismatch becomes a significant source of distress — what the clinical literature calls gender dysphoria.

But here is the finding the political movement against transgender youth consistently ignores. With support, the outcomes are dramatically different. Children whose gender identities are affirmed by their families show outcomes comparable to their cisgender peers. The variable that produces the difference is not the child’s gender identity. It is the response of the people around them.

The binary itself — the proposition that there are exactly two genders, that they correspond reliably to bodies, and that the correspondence is fixed at birth — is itself a manufactured certainty, and one of the most stubborn.

The writer Kate Bornstein made this argument in 1994, in a book called Gender Outlaw that has shaped trans and queer thought ever since. Bornstein’s claim is not that nonbinary or trans people should be tolerated within the existing binary. It is that the binary is the project — a coercive social fiction maintained through ritual, language, and violence — and that those who refuse or fail to perform a legible binary gender are not deviants. They are witnesses to the system’s seams.

My son arrived already on the other side of that argument, before he had the words for it. The work Bornstein did in 1994 was, in a smaller and more domestic way, the work my wife and I had to do twenty years later in our own house — not because we were opposed, but because the certainty around the gender binary was so effectively manufactured and infused into our thought processes. We had to overcome that initial knee-jerk reaction to someone who challenged it.

That knee-jerk reaction was put to the test in the chaos of that Easter morning. My two-and-a-half-year-old was determined not to put on a dress, and by determined, I mean he had channeled Jackie Chan, with kicks that landed cleanly and contortions worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performance.

The dress, by the way, was the same one he and his sister wore only a couple of months earlier for a school picture. His sister was only too happy to comply. Our son was not. He claimed that the dress, in spite of the pictorial evidence, was not his. In fact, he refused to wear any clothes that looked “girly,” which of course presented quite the problem, since our working assumption prior to that point was that we had another girl.

Since our motivation was purely to avoid social shaming from being late, our knee-jerk reaction quickly gave way to compromise. We found an outfit that was passably gender neutral and ran with it.

My son is seventeen now. But in my mind’s eye, I can still see him as that little boy unabashedly making his way down the aisle in the middle of Easter Service. His awkwardly authentic stride. The passably-gender-neutral ensemble of faded t-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers making him look like he’d just escaped from a poorly funded orphanage. Oliver Twist, with swagger.

This, in contrast to his sister half-skipping, half-dancing her way down the aisle. Lacey spring dress, bright white shoes, pony-tailed hair bouncing with every step. Not exactly how we scripted it, but they were both happy. Us, not so much.

That’s kind of been his life up to this point. Happy when he can just be his authentic self. But there is the flip side, too. He has had to witness adults expressing their outrage at school board meetings to protest the reading of a children’s book about a trans kid — a kid just like him. And he has spoken at those meetings, with a composure that puts the people opposing him to shame.

In that Easter morning moment, my son had a better grasp of an engineering principle than most of the adults in the room — including me. If the model doesn’t match the data, it’s time to change the model. He was a child who knew himself better than we did, brave enough to bring it to our attention and determined enough to stick to his convictions. We just had to start listening.

I think of this story and smile whenever some anti-trans legislator calls for trans-affirming parents to be prosecuted for felony child abuse — accused of turning our kids trans.

Have you ever tried to convince a kid to perform even the most rudimentary forms of human hygiene, like taking a bath or brushing their teeth? Convincing a child to completely transition would be as futile as trying to convince my trans son to wear a dress. And it would be as destructive as trying to convert a trans child to be cisgender.

Around the time he turned three, he started asking me when he was going to get his peanut. That was his word for penis. His daycare teachers told us that whenever they called for boys to line up for the bathroom, he consistently stood up with the boys. I tried, badly at first, to explain. At one point I said, “On the inside you’re a boy, but on the outside you’re a girl.” He nodded. A few days later, he came back to it. “No,” he said. “That’s not right. I’m a boy on the inside and on the outside.” He was right. I was the one who needed to work harder. He has a variation of a boy’s body that is less common. That’s why it’s described as dysphoria.

I doubt I will ever be able to put into words how despondent our son had become from the dysphoria. All I can tell you is that it was a matter of life and death. Our decision to affirm his identity was made to keep him alive. We would rather have a child who is alive and happy than a child who takes his own life because we refused to learn and grow ourselves. After we affirmed his identity, it was like a light switch. He went from despair to a happy kid who couldn’t wait to go to school.

By the time he entered kindergarten, his principal — Craig McCalla of Cornerstone Elementary in Dexter, Michigan — had no prior experience with transgender students, but was completely committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment. Craig assured us his job was to provide a safe and supportive environment for every one of his students. Because all means all. It didn’t make a bit of difference whether we were talking about learning challenges, physical disabilities, or gender dysphoria.

To give you an idea of how effective that culture was, I remember driving my son home from school one afternoon when he was around seven, and he casually mentioned that he wanted to be like Martin when he grows up. I asked which Martin. He said, “You know, the one who had a dream.” He had heard the I Have a Dream speech, about being free and equal, and he wanted to be like that. To be like Martin.

My son later described the experience of those years to a Detroit News reporter as “pretty normal. I was treated like every other kid.” That normalcy, so hard-won, so valuable, is now the target of a coordinated legislative campaign across the United States.

To understand that campaign, you have to understand that it did not originate from parents concerned about their children’s wellbeing, or from physicians uncertain about the evidence. It originated from a specific political calculation made around 2014 by conservative political operatives in Houston, Texas. Public attitudes were shifting rapidly, and anti-discrimination legislation was advancing. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, in particular, drew the operatives’ attention because of its provisions allowing transgender people to use facilities matching their gender identity.

A local lawyer named Jared Woodfill and a local right-wing radio host, Steven Hotze, hatched what became the template for the entire national anti-trans movement. They launched a fear-mongering advertising campaign that branded transgender people as sexual predators — specifically, as men who would dress as women to gain access to bathrooms where they could assault children. This claim had no factual basis. None. Law enforcement across states that had adopted trans-inclusive policies reported no increase in bathroom-related assaults. The evidence against the claim was available, unambiguous, and utterly irrelevant to the campaign — because the campaign was never about evidence. It was about fear.

The Houston experiment worked well enough to be replicated. Republican-sponsored legislation targeting transgender people spread across the country. And when the bathroom narrative proved untenable, the operatives refocused on a more vulnerable target. Transgender children. Gender-affirming care was reframed not as evidence-based medicine but as chemical castration. As sexual mutilation of children. Parents who supported their transgender children’s medical care were cast as abusers.

When I testified before the Michigan State Board of Education in 2016, the arguments against inclusive policy covered religious objections, bathroom safety, and parental rights. By 2022, the campaigns had added girls’ and women’s sports. Sports holds a uniquely powerful place in American culture, easily rivaling religion, and it is governed by rules that are essentially negotiated — which made it an ideal wedge, an issue where the arguments do not translate directly to a person’s right to exist.

But that is exactly what the wedge is for. Sports legislation is being used as a Trojan Horse to pass laws that ban gender-affirming health care, restrict bathroom use, and forbid the mention of trans lives in public schools. The historical parallel is exact. Black athletes were once banned from competition on the basis of pseudo-scientific argument, and those same false arguments were then extended to justify the broader denial of civil and human rights.

This is the mechanism of manufactured certainty at its most cynical. The genuine complexity of gender was erased and replaced with a false binary. Normal children being harmed by a radical ideological agenda. That binary was not discovered. It was constructed. And it was constructed specifically because complexity does not mobilize a voting base.

Let me bring you back to the science, because it is unambiguous, and the law is overriding it. The biology of sex is not binary. This is not a controversial claim in biology. It is established fact. Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental biologist at Brown University, has documented that intersex conditions affect between 1.7 and 4 percent of the population, depending on how intersex is defined. That is millions of people. The binary the law is trying to enforce is not a feature of nature that legislators are merely acknowledging. It is a simplification of nature that serves a social function.

The neuroscience tells the same story. Brain-imaging studies have found, across multiple independent samples, that transgender people show structural and functional characteristics more consistent with their identified gender than with the sex they were assigned at birth. The research is correlational and still developing — gender identity is not reducible to a brain scan. But the findings are flatly inconsistent with the claim that a transgender identity is a misunderstanding, a mental illness, or an ideology. It is a stable, deeply held sense of self — and not one that any intervention can talk a person out of.

The clinical literature on conversion therapy is unambiguous. It does not work. It causes documented harm. And every major American medical and psychological organization opposes it.

Gender identity is also not binary. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey — the first nationally representative federal survey to ask — found that 3.3 percent of U.S. high school students identify as transgender, with another 2.2 percent questioning their gender identity. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School estimates approximately 1.6 million Americans aged thirteen and older identify as transgender. These are not ideological inventions. They are the self-reports of human beings describing their own experience.

And the medical evidence on what happens when those self-reports are taken seriously is unambiguous. The 2022 Tordoff study in JAMA Network Open found that access to gender-affirming care was associated with a 60 percent lower odds of depression and a 73 percent lower odds of suicidality among transgender youth. The Trevor Project’s research consistently finds that having even one accepting adult is associated with dramatically reduced rates of suicidal ideation.

This is the consensus that legislation is overriding. Not with better evidence. With manufactured certainty. In 2023 alone, twenty-two states enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors. The people who passed those laws did not, for the most part, sit with parents of transgender children, or consult the medical organizations that had spent decades developing the standards of care. They listened to a political movement that had identified transgender children as a useful focal point for the mobilization of fear.

Let me be direct about what this means in personal terms. My crime — the thing that conservative legislators in Michigan sought to make a felony punishable by life in prison under House Bill 6454 — is that I am the father of a transgender son, and I supported the medical recommendations of pediatric endocrinologists at the University of Michigan Health System. I enabled my son to receive evidence-based care. I am not ashamed of this. I am angry that the people proposing to criminalize it were not.

My son is seventeen now. By all appearances, my son is a boy. And yet he now enters adulthood painfully aware that he is not entitled to the same individual liberties, the same civil rights, the same human rights as his peers. He has the personal experience of being denied gender-affirming care at one of the premier hospital systems in the world — the University of Michigan Medical Center — because Trump’s executive order to withhold federal funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care has been tragically effective, even at an institution that has been at the forefront of such care.

This disconnect — between the actual lives of transgender young people and the political construction of them as a threat — is not accidental. It is the point. The anti-trans movement is not, at its core, about transgender children. It is about the defense of a certainty — the certainty of a fixed, binary gender order — that transgender people, simply by existing, disturb.

Today’s attacks on transgender children deploy the same three instruments that sustained segregation. Religion. Nationalism. Fear. The specific accusations are different — grooming instead of amalgamation, gender ideology instead of race mixing — but the underlying structure is identical. In 2023, at least one Mississippi legislator invoked Plessy v. Ferguson — the case that gave us separate but equal — to justify separate treatment for transgender students. They did not offer Plessy as an embarrassing precedent to be avoided. They offered it as a model to be followed.

I watched the manufactured certainty that my son was confused, or disordered, or that his identity was a phase come into contact with the evidence of his actual life — and I watched that certainty fail. This is what false certainty always does when it meets the evidence. It fails. The question is whether it fails before or after it has done catastrophic damage.

I have to be honest about one more thing. The people defending the gender-binary certainty are defending something real to them — a map of the world that tells them who they are and where they belong. They will not surrender it easily. But they can be reached. For a long stretch of this fight, my own certainty about the other side was as closed as theirs. That, too, was a kind of map I had to be willing to redraw.

I have watched my son navigate this entire thing with a psychological composure that many of the adults opposing him cannot muster. He is, very simply, better at this than they are. More informed. More precise. More honest. More rooted.

If I could get the adults who hold power in this country to have one conversation with one of these kids — a real conversation, not a policy-page hypothetical — the manufactured certainty would, in many of them, crumble. Because kids don’t perform certainty. They live. And when you sit with them, you see that the certainty you have been sold about their lives is unsupportable.