Just Fucking Saying

I saw a meme on Facebook this morning that made me stop and think.

The meme said, “No child thinks they’re born in the wrong body until a creepy adult deliberately puts that idea in their head. Just saying…”

And the person who posted it added, “absofuckinglutely.”

Well, that got me thinking about a whole bunch of fucking things.

First and foremost, it made me wonder what some of my so-called friends from over the years actually think about me. Do they believe I made all this shit up? Do they think I woke up one morning as an adult and decided, “You know what would be fucking fantastic? Making my life exponentially harder for absolutely no goddamned reason,  that’s what.”

Because let me tell you something: my life got harder. A whole fucking lot harder.

Twenty-five years ago, I was on the management fast track. I had a career, a reputation, knowledge, experience, and a future that seemed pretty fucking promising. And then I came out.

Suddenly, I wasn't on the fast track anymore.

I lost friends. I lost familial relationships. I watched opportunities pass me by for years, then decades. I got laughed at, jeered at, ridiculed, and dismissed. My knowledge and experience, the things I'd spent years developing, suddenly seemed to matter a whole lot less than how I fucking looked.

I had to claw my way back. Every step. Every promotion. Every opportunity. And it often felt like I had to prove myself three times over just to be considered equal to somebody who'd never had to fight that particular battle.

And I came out at a time when being transgender wasn't mainstream. It wasn't a subject being discussed on every fucking television network. There weren't endless social media arguments about pronouns, bathrooms, and who should be allowed to exist in public.

Hell, my health insurance had a specific “transsexual exception” clause that it used to deny me of routine coverage.

That's the world I came out into.

So when I see somebody casually sharing a meme suggesting that transgender identity is something creepy adults plant in children's heads, I can't help wondering what they actually believe about me.

Are they perfectly pleasant to my face while privately thinking I'm some kind of fraud? Do they think somebody talked me into this? Do they believe I invented a lifetime of experiences because I wanted attention?

Probably some of them do.

And here's the funny thing: I don't particularly give a fuck anymore.

I've reached that wonderful stage of life where other people's opinions don't carry nearly the weight they once did. And after dying three times and getting run down on Cerrillos Road, I've developed an even stronger appreciation for the phrase “fuck you and yours.”

I've got a life to live. I've got people I love. I've got motorcycles to ride, books to write, and a whole lot of living left to do. I'm not wasting whatever time I have left trying to convince somebody that my existence meets with their approval.

But I am curious.

Not wounded. Not devastated. Curious.

Because that meme illustrates exactly what happens when a complicated human experience gets turned into a political fucking football.

And here's where I'm going to piss off both fucking sides: the underlying concern is completely fucking valid.

Sorry, libs, but it's fucking true.

We SHOULD be questioning hard before administering life-altering drugs to our children. We should be goddamned good and sure.

A child's mind isn't fully developed. That's not an insult to children. That's a fucking fact. There's a reason we don't let twelve-year-olds sign mortgage contracts, buy whiskey, or decide they're going to drop out of school and become professional fucking astronauts.

And quite frankly, we don't know nearly enough about what this even is.

What causes someone to be transgender? Is there a biological explanation? A neurological explanation? Something else entirely? And if there is a biological cause, shouldn't we be trying to find a better way to diagnose it than relying primarily on the word of a child who thinks they can walk to fucking China to find out what Asian chocolate tastes like?

Children experience real things. But that doesn't mean they always understand what they're experiencing.

And that brings me to another question nobody seems particularly interested in asking without immediately turning it into a political fucking argument: are we overdiagnosing?

Are children being diagnosed incorrectly? Are medical professionals being influenced by political beliefs, social pressure, or the fear of being accused of intolerance? Are we making decisions based on what the evidence actually says, or are we making them because somebody wants to win a fucking culture war?

Are we overdiagnosing out of fucking spite?

I don't know the answers to those questions. And that's precisely why I want them fucking asked, investigated, and answered with actual evidence.

Because if we're administering medical treatments that can permanently alter children's lives, we'd better be damn sure we're doing it for the right reasons.

And if we're getting it wrong, there are real children who are going to live with the consequences long after the politicians and activists have moved on to their next fucking outrage.

But here's the distinction that seems to escape the people sharing memes like the one I saw this morning: questioning medical treatment for children is not the same thing as denying that transgender children exist.

You want to argue about medical intervention? Fine. Let's have that fucking conversation.

But don't tell me the experience itself is something a creepy adult invented and planted in a child's head.

Because I was that child.

And nobody had to tell me a goddamned thing.

I grew up before the internet. Before social media. Before transgender people became the subject of every other political argument in America. We didn't have TikTok influencers explaining gender identity. We didn't have online communities where kids could compare experiences.

Hell, my school barely had fucking books.

That's a joke. You're supposed to laugh.

We didn't even have the vocabulary that exists today. The word “transgender” wasn't part of my childhood. Nobody sat me down and explained gender dysphoria. Nobody showed me a video or handed me a pamphlet or suggested that I might have been born in the wrong body.

And yet, from my earliest fucking memories, when I was three or four years old, I knew something was wrong.

Something about my gender didn't fit.

I didn't have a name for it. I didn't have an explanation. I certainly didn't have a roadmap for what to do about it.

But I knew.

And I learned very fucking quickly that whatever I was feeling wasn't acceptable.

So I hid it.

I buried it as deeply as I could. I tried to make it disappear. I tried to convince myself that if I ignored it long enough, if I worked hard enough, if I became masculine enough, eventually the problem would go away.

I went out of my fucking way to be manly.

Not just masculine. Extra fucking masculine.

And the misery kept building.

Year after year. Decade after decade.

There were nights when I put the barrel of a rifle in my mouth.

That's how fucking miserable I was.

Not because somebody had convinced me that I was transgender. Not because I'd been influenced by a political movement. Not because I'd seen something on the internet.

Because something I'd known about myself since my earliest memories had become something I believed I could never live with openly.

So when somebody tells me no child experiences this unless a pervert puts the idea in their head, I have a very simple response: you're fucking wrong.

You can argue about treatment. You can argue about diagnostic standards. You can argue about what decisions children should or shouldn't be allowed to make. Those are legitimate subjects for discussion.

But you don't get to erase my childhood because it doesn't fit your political narrative.

And now let's talk about the other side of this argument.

Because recognizing that children can experience gender dysphoria doesn't automatically answer the question of how they should be treated.

Those are two different fucking things.

A child can experience something real without necessarily understanding its cause, its permanence, or the best way to address it. That's true of all kinds of medical and psychological conditions. It's why diagnosis matters. It's why evidence matters. It's why careful evaluation matters.

And it's why I want medical professionals asking hard questions instead of simply telling people what they want to hear.

If we're getting something wrong, we need to know. If children are receiving inappropriate treatment, we need to identify why and prevent it. And if children who genuinely need care are being denied it because politicians have decided their existence is inconvenient, we need to address that too.

That's what serious medicine is supposed to do.

Study the problem. Follow the evidence. Understand the risks. Treat the patient.

And I'm going to be a little fucking radical here and probably piss off both sides.

I think medical decisions belong between doctors and patients. And when the patient is a fucking minor, the parents get to decide. Period.

That's what parents fucking do. They make decisions for their children because children aren't adults. We recognize that distinction in practically every other aspect of their lives, so why the fuck are we pretending it suddenly doesn't matter when we're talking about potentially life-altering medical procedures?

For fuck's sake, if a child needs a parent's signature to go on a school field trip to the goddamned museum, then parental permission ought to be a requirement before that child undergoes medical treatment that could affect the rest of their fucking life.

And yes, the doctor has a responsibility to provide sound medical advice, explain the risks, and recommend appropriate treatment. That's the doctor's fucking job. But the decision belongs to the family, not some politician sitting in a state capitol, and certainly not a government bureaucrat who has never met the child.

I don't need the government deciding which medical treatments my children can receive. I don't need politicians inserting themselves into the examination room. And I sure as fuck don't need the state appointing itself the ultimate parent of every child in America.

What kind of toddler fucking nation are we building here, where we've created an all-knowing governmental parent to watch over every decision we make?

Parents parent. Doctors practice medicine. Government needs to step the fuck back.

And I want the fucking research.

Real research. Good research. Long-term research.

If gender dysphoria has a biological basis, study it. If psychological and developmental factors play a role, study those too. If we're misdiagnosing people, figure out why. If treatments are helping, establish how, for whom, and under what circumstances. If they're causing harm, identify it and change what we're doing.

That's not anti-transgender.

That's wanting to understand what the fuck we're dealing with.

And frankly, I have a very personal interest in finding out.

Because I'm going to be pretty goddamned pissed off if, thirty years from now, scientists discover that somebody could have given four-year-old me a shot and spared me decades of misery.

Think about that.

What if there was something we could have understood? Something we could have identified? Something that might have changed the course of my life before I spent decades trying to survive it?

I don't know.

And neither does the person sharing that fucking meme.

That's the point.

We have questions. Important questions. Questions that affect real human beings, real families, and real children who deserve something better than becoming ammunition in somebody else's political argument.

But instead of asking those questions, we're passing around memes accusing people of manufacturing an experience that some of us have lived with since before we could even spell our own fucking names.

So here's my suggestion: if you want to argue for careful medical evaluation of children, argue for it.

If you want better research, demand it.

If you're concerned about irreversible treatment decisions, ask the hard questions and insist on evidence.

But don't tell me I couldn't possibly have known something was wrong when I was four years old.

Don't tell me somebody had to put the idea in my head.

And don't pretend that reducing an entire lifetime of human experience to a fucking Facebook meme is the same thing as thinking critically.

Because I was there.

I lived it.

And I know what I fucking knew.

Just fucking saying.