"What if it was your daughter?"
And other links for your Sunday
This is the Sunday newsletter, where I share some thoughts on a topic I’ve been reading about, along with some links for your Sunday morning reading. While the newsletters that are publish on Wednesday and Friday are free, the Sunday newsletter is paywalled. This newsletter takes a lot of time and effort to put together. It’s a full-time job for me and a part-time job for my editor and assistant editor. Thank you for subscribing.
More than once, I’ve been in conversations with well-meaning liberal people who have looked at me in the middle of a political conversation and asked, “Well, what if it was your daughter who got beaten by a trans kid?”
My daughter is an athlete. She’s a swimmer, and it’s been one of the great joys of my life watching her find a sport she loves, and through that sport find her strength, her power, and her motivation. I was not an athlete growing up and I was also homeschooled, so I’ve had to learn the hard way how to Sports Mom. And how to Sports Mom in America, where sports culture for kids is its own pernicious cult, with its rules and norms and intensity that can be off-putting and alarming.
I want my daughter to be happy. I love to see her do her best. But I simply don’t care if she wins. If she wins or loses, my life is the same. Even she doesn’t want to win, exactly. Yes, I think she’d be thrilled if she woke up tomorrow and was the best swimmer in the state. But her goals are more about shaving off a second here, half a second there. Getting stronger. Remember to have fun at practice; remember to stretch. And also, her goals are hers. They are not mine. I don’t have goals for my kids except that they grow up to be kind, empathetic humans with hearts for service.
And I hate that question, “What if it was your daughter?” because the question makes a lot of assumptions. It assumes that my allyship would end the moment my daughter lost a meet to a trans kid. It assumes that my daughter’s rights are threatened by the rights of trans people. The question invokes the specter of my daughter, a blond white girl, as somehow under threat from her trans peers. Invoking nonexistent threats to white girls is a tactic that has been used throughout history to justify horrific racialized violence. And how dare people use my child’s body as a way to justify their transphobia and hate.