In his State of the Union address last night, the president used a young person to try and show the harms of gender transition. I thus feel the need to say again to trans youth: your gender identities are valid and you are worthy. As vile as the president’s speech was, though, it offers a lesson that can help people take action against its content.
Let me start by saying that although some youth may say they are trans before affirming that they are cisgender, the number of trans youth who do “detransition” is very, very small, as study after study has shown. I don’t want to assume anything about the president’s invitee, but rather to note that we should not use that person’s experience to generalize to the whole. (I am not naming the invitee, since I don’t know if the name and pronouns the president used are the ones the person would actually choose.)
The president’s speech, however, demonstrates a principle we can use in our own advocacy. The State of the Union included a string of awards and recognitions introduced by stories about each person. Yes, these seemed pretty clearly to be a way of distracting from issues of substance—but the president uses such tales, I believe, because he knows that people love stories. Although I find the man repellant and disagree with him on almost every policy issue, I concede that he is a skilled showman.
We can—and must—counter his use of cherry-picked stories about trans and other LGBTQ lives by sharing our own in great numbers. These can help people see that a single person’s experience does not necessarily represent the whole, but that there are certain throughlines which appear when one looks at our collective experiences, such as the importance of affirmation, support, and community and the harms of bias and discrimination.
How to proceed? We can share these stories one on one with neighbors, friends, and relatives. We can talk to or write to our elected officials. We can write op-eds. We can tell our stories to organizations like Family Equality and GLAD Law, who each have active storytelling campaigns that tie into their advocacy work. Advocates for Trans Equality, too, has a helpful guide for trans people and allies about “How to Testify for Trans Rights,” which stresses the role of personal stories.
We can reach out to the media, including Mombian and other blogs, magazines, and newspapers; podcasts focused on LGBTQ parenting stories, like The Queer Family Podcast, becoming babyREADY, and Fathernetics; and social media channels like Gays With Kids. We can share, too, on our own social media accounts.
Of course, privacy and personal safety are paramount. We must each as individuals decide whether and how much to share. This goes doubly for those of us who are parents and have our kids’ safety and privacy to protect. But that’s all the more reason for those of us who do feel able to share something about our lives to do so—while those who feel that they can’t should still consider resharing and reposting what others have put into the world. And while again, we must be extra careful around sharing the stories of minors, we can share our own stories from childhood that may cast light on today’s LGBTQ youth and those with LGBTQ parents.
Yes, our stories must be supported by data in order to advance inclusive policies and win court battles. Organizations like UCLA’s Williams Institute and the Movement Advancement Project have our back there. But stories tap into human emotions in a way that data doesn’t, and that’s a vital component of driving change.
It can often feel tiring to keep telling our stories and sharing our lives (even just parts of them), especially if we are not prone to being extroverts. But the need to do so today is as great as it ever has been, arguably more so.
There is much more that could be said about last night’s State of the Union, and I’m happy to see that others are hard at work on that. It was for me an enraging speech the entire way through. The overarching takeaway, for me, though, is the ongoing need to counter it with our own stories—a wave of stories that show both our individuality and our common humanity. I hope you’ll join me in this effort.