Hypothetical children
In 2018, minister Dave Barnhart made a post on Facebook that I still think about. In it, he discussed the ways in which many Christians advocated for the unborn to the exclusion of almost anybody else they might advocate for, including groups Jesus specifically asked his followers to care for. You can read the post in full here, but I wanted to excerpt the following:
[The unborn] allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. ... They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
I have been thinking about Barnhart's words a lot lately, not just because the ongoing assault on abortion rights from the American right is a national disgrace. No, I've been thinking constantly about how often we pretend to be wrestling with problems to protect children who are merely hypothetical. Yet in our rush to protect these hypothetical children, we crush children who actually exist.
You can probably apply my metaphor to any number of ongoing situations in the world, most of which I'd be talking out of my ass to discuss. But I've felt it most powerfully when it comes to the conversation around trans children, whose rights are usually treated as a series of questions around what might happen if someday some child regrets that they did something around their gender. In the name of these hypothetical, regret-filled humans who realized they were cis too late, we will punish endless numbers of people who will tell you, quite clearly, what it is they need to exist as themselves.
Emily St. James
I want to be clear: There are detransitioners, and there are people who do regret elements of their transitions. There are, so far as we can tell, very few of them, even if we don't have great data on the question. But they do exist. However, the typical media narrative around detransition and transition regret is driven almost entirely by the version of this story that is most easily imagined by a cis person, which is to say one that happens so rarely the media keeps trotting out the same half-dozen examples to prove how common it is. In this narrative, a gullible and wayward child is confused and misled by people who claim to have their best interests at heart, only to wake up one morning to find a dread metamorphosis has been visited upon them without their consent.
Often, these narratives are presented through an evangelical Christian lens because, well, they are fundamentally narratives of hitting rock bottom and needing redemption, though when they appear in the mainstream press, the religiosity is filed off. What is notable about this narrative is how little room it has for the agency of any individual within it. At no point did the sufferer of transition regret have an opportunity to stop any of this because the trans agenda is simply too powerful.
If you talk to trans kids, you will find that they are often ferociously eloquent advocates for themselves – beyond their years even. To get your parents to listen to you and re-form their ideas of who you are in their heads in real time is an act of extreme fortitude, and it requires standing up for oneself to a degree few children have the wherewithal to even try. Yet our stories around youth transition largely ignore this idea in favor of believing that kids are unthinking, unfeeling automatons who do whatever the adults tell them to, even as anybody who's had so much as a 1-year-old will tell you that's incorrect. To believe that kids can be advocates for themselves is, in its own way, destabilizing to our social order. So we believe in hypotheticals instead.
The irony in all of this is that the most prevalent detransition narrative is successful precisely because it provokes something very like gender dysphoria in cis people. This story asks you to imagine what might happen if your agency over your body was taken from you, if it was ripped into pieces by some powerful force beyond your control, if you started to change in ways you found alienating. And the well-meaning cis person who reads this narrative concludes that, yes, this would be horrifying, while rarely making the cognitive leap to "Oh, but this is just what a lot of trans people go through, huh?" because the nice thing about a hypothetical child is that you never need imagine anything other than yourself.
That limited imagination is implicit to Barnhart's point above. When imagining an unborn child who needs protection and love, the easiest thing to do is imagine someone who is very close to your own set of circumstances. If you ask me to just picture a child, right now, the odds are that I'll imagine someone very like myself or my toddler – white, upper middle class, etc., etc. I even now find myself being slightly confused when I find out other kids have moms and dads because the concept of my kid having two moms has been so cemented in my brain. "Think of the children," then, never really has more than a handful of children (at best) in mind. It usually simply means "Think of me!"
And, to be sure, in writing this, I am asking you to, yes, think of me when you think of the children. You may find my motives suspect because I am reading my own experience of being a trans youth – one of dissociation and immense psychological pain – onto the experiences of present-day youths who are trans, even though they will necessarily have different experiences due to being different people. I would like to think, however, that I might have slightly more expertise in the matter than most cis people, outside of cis parents of trans kids.
That, however, is the point: We all create phantoms in our brain that we either need to fear or protect, and we structure too much of our lives around those actions. This tendency has become especially pronounced as our world has become more disconnected and isolated, as more and more of us find ourselves feeling alienated from our neighbors. It is a lot easier to be convinced a child you can see in your day to day life is somehow not "real" if you don't really get to know them. And that might lead you to imagining a child who is easier for you to conceive of, a child who is closer to yourself.
We use hypothetical children in so many circumstances when it becomes inconvenient to consider the existence of real ones. Whether we are trying to ignore the mass-murder of children in an ongoing war or look away from the endless parade of deaths in school shootings, we are constantly prioritizing the hypotheticals we can most easily picture over that which is actually happening. We stick with what is hypothetical because it asks the least of us. When reality becomes too inconvenient or painful to look at, we can always burrow further into the moral simplicity of our imaginations, where we are always careful to protect ourselves and almost no one else.
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A good newsletter: My dear friend Eliza Clark writes Witch's Mark, an amazing newsletter that is about the tarot but also a whole bunch of other things. It's one of the few newsletters I read as soon as I get it, and I think you will, too, if you subscribe. You can read it here, and I've excerpted one of my favorite posts below.
This morning, my daughter came downstairs and reported to me, “The sun looks really close today, is the world gonna end?” Bless her sweet little anxious heart, this poor kid got every faulty gene I had to offer. Meanwhile, her brother is psyched that he’s gonna be dead for billions of years before the sun explodes.
If you ask my son what happens after you die, he’ll tell you confidently that you’re sucked up into a portal in the sky and then you come back down to earth as a baby. Okay! Who am I to say that’s not what happens? Wherever he got that from, it’s comforting to him. I’ve never confirmed or argued against it. Instead I nod and say: “Hmm. That’s an interesting idea.”
This week's reading music: "Pink Pony Club" by Chappell Roan (I usually try to make these reflect the newsletter somehow, but I just like this song a lot)
The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published most Wednesdays, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).
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