One year later.

It’s been a year.

On June 6, 2021, I wrote a piece on here called Turncoat, publicly distancing myself from the gender critical (GC) movement I’d been a part of.

Today is June 6, 2022. So, it’s been a year. Not that a year is necessarily a lot, in terms of one person. And even if those twelve months did amount to much personally, in the way of time, that would just make the over two years leading up to 2021, when I was a full-on, “let’s create a Canadian GC coalition!” GCer, stretch out even further in terms of my past awfulness and harm.

So, a year.

Not much can happen in a year. A whole lot of shite can happen in a year.

Within the last year Canada banned “conversion therapy”, making that practice a federal offense in our Criminal Code, subject to up to five years in prison. The Conversion Therapy Ban was passed by Canadian parliamentarians unanimously.

Let me say that again.

Canadian parliament UNANIMOUSLY passed The Conversion Therapy Ban.

That’s a rarity in politics, and meant to send a message to the world. In other words, it’s a pretty big, f*cking deal.

And why did our House of Commons get this right? Because they recognized the following:

“Conversion therapy causes harm to society because, among other things, it is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality, cisgender gender identity, and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations, gender identities and gender expressions.”

Included in this year, however, have also been many disturbing, homophobic and transphobic events, including Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, as well as Alabama’s anti-trans legislation, making it a felony to help provide gender-affirming care to trans youth. And don’t get me started on the state of abortion rights in the USA (as a dual citizen, I can’t wrap my brain around how my other country is imploding).

Also within this year (just days ago, in fact) was an episode of GCer Helen Staniland’s podcast called “Wine With Women”, featuring fellow GCer Helen Joyce (someone I am now ashamed to admit I once shared a meal with) as the guest.

During their online conversation, Joyce didn’t mince her words about how she perceives trans people, stating:

“Every one of those [trans] people is a person who’s been damaged…every one of those people is…a huge problem to a sane world.”

A huge problem to a sane world.

And what is her solution to this “huge problem”?

“We have to try and limit the harm, and that means reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition.”

When I heard these words, it reminded me of how my own former beliefs had been only a few steps behind such vitriol, as Cawsbar (my former GC group) tried (and thankfully failed!) to get Canadian politicians onboard to fight against banning conversion therapy for trans youth. That’s far too recent for me to forget how I patronizingly, presumptuously, and ignorantly perceived trans kids and teens as being “confused”, and needing “help” from therapists to explore why they “thought” they weren’t the gender assigned to them at birth (such “exploration” would undoubtedly include intense pressure from a therapist to have the youth deny, push down, or forever hide their true gender identity, resulting in shame and immutable harm).

Joyce’s words also reminded me of analogous ones that were thrust at me by a stranger, a decade ago, in the first year after my then-preschooler was diagnosed as autistic (little did I know that I was autistic, too).

Today I grabbed the memoir I’d written a long time ago about that year (yes, it was also a year), to better remember the hyperbole that was meant to frighten me, to shame me into trying to stop my child from being who he was. How eerily that stranger’s words about needing to somehow stop my autistic little boy from being autistic now remind me of Joyce’s gross statements about trans youth and adults.

Here’s what I wrote about that experience:

“I’m doing the dishes when a stranger calls. It’s a woman, with a breathless voice, seemingly desperate to tell me about some sort of treatment she ‘knows’ will ‘cure’ my autistic child. She explains that she had read a [family] column by my husband just that morning, and considered the situation to be so terribly urgent that she immediately looked up our name in the phone book and gave me a call. This woman…is a complete stranger to me and knows nothing about my personal thoughts or views regarding my son. Who I am seems irrelevant to her. All that matters is that she gets her message expressed, and gets it expressed immediately!

I listen to this woman, stunned, wondering if I can possibly hang up without somehow putting my husband’s job in jeopardy. I know he gets a lot of emails from readers about his columns…But that is email, written to the address that he provides at the end of each column. Not to mention the fact that each email is sent to him, the writer of the column, and not his wife, who is merely a bystander in all of this.

As the woman rambles on, I feel increasingly anxious about even politely interrupting her to explain that I did not write any column and that she thus needs to shut the hell up. But if I refuse to listen to this unsolicited advice, will there be a nasty Letter to the Editor splashed in next Monday’s paper?

As the woman continues in her breathy, urgent way, I become increasingly aware that an invisible line has been crossed. This stranger calling my house, demanding that I listen to her wisdom, assuming she knows best when it comes to my son?

For the rest of the day I feel unsettled and almost dirty, as if in need of a shower. Many times I pace the main floor of my house, trying to collect my loose thoughts into a coherent whole…When I finally figure out what I am feeling, it comes together in one word: Enough.

After months of books filled with competing, often contradictory information, numerous treatment interventions, and signing up for endless waiting lists, I’d had my fill of receiving any unsolicited advice from people I don’t know (and more importantly, don’t know Max), about how to help my child…

I recognize the need for ongoing skill-learning and intervention seeking. Max continues to need help to navigate the highly complex social world that exists around him. He just does. I’m not a pie in the sky idiot. I recognize that if it’s tough at four, it’s going to be that much tougher at fourteen.

I know that. I get that. But here’s the thing. Here’s the really big, gigantic, in your face thing: Most of who Max is (and that includes many of his so-called “quirks”), I wouldn’t change at all. Not one iota. Nada. For example, I find many of his stims endearing, I find his ways of showing affection lovely. I find the way he looks at life to be uniquely Max.

I don’t think there is a wonderful little boy hidden within the autism. I think that the wonderful little boy and the autism are one. Max is autistic, just like he’s half-Jewish, and has brown hair, and is a spitting image of his Daddy at age four. Autism is part of what makes Max Max.

The level of desperation that the woman expressed on the phone doesn’t match up with the sweet little boy who just this morning asked me, “And how is your day going so far, Mommy?”. It just doesn’t. He isn’t an emergency that needs to be dealt with STAT. He isn’t someone who should be tossed into this experimental intervention or that, just in the hopes that it may work. My child is not a guinea pig. He is a delightful autistic little boy, full stop…

Max cannot be separated from autism. The child I know and adore is autistic. It may have taken me months to get where I now am…, but now that the learning has at least started, I can say this definitively: Max’s autism is not an ailment…It is not a blanket that is hiding the true child underneath. It is a part of him, interwoven into his unique personality and temperament. If autism was somehow removed from Maxwell, what would be left?”

As I read this, and memories of that unsolicited, wildly inappropriate phone call come flooding back, I can only imagine what loving parents of trans kids feel regarding Joyce’s disgusting comments. And, now knowing I’m autistic myself, I can barely fathom what trans youth and adults themselves feel about Joyce spouting her rhetoric about each trans person being “damaged”, and a “huge problem to a sane world”.

Like the way in which Max (or me, or anyone) and autism are one and the same, people who are trans are not separate from their gender identity. They are not damaged, they are not a problem to a “sane” world (as if such a world even exists!).

What is the problem is people like Joyce (or once, like me) believing that trans people are in need of being “fixed” to match a gender identity that was never theirs in the first place. What is the problem is people like Joyce thinking that “keeping down the number of people who transition” is somehow a good thing, a beneficial thing, for society. What is the problem is people like Joyce not recognizing the damage, the incalculable, irreparable damage, that occurs when you try to force someone to be who they are not, and cannot be. What is the problem is people like Joyce implying that by not allowing anyone to transition, or by forcing ultimately useless interventions such as conversion therapy, trans people will stop being trans, much like how certain time-intensive “treatments” were/are meant to stop autistic people from seeming (or being) autistic.

Spoiler alert: Much like autistic people, trans people have, and always will, exist. Trying to prevent them from transitioning by pushing them back into the proverbial closet doesn’t prevent anything other than forcing people to keep who they actually are stuffed in cramped darkness. Preventing anyone from transitioning only serves to keep fellow human beings, who are deserving of respect and dignity because they are human beings (!!!), from living as their true selves, instead allowing their very identity, and thus themselves, to slowly suffocate, deprived of enough oxygen.

No person should have to try and force themselves to be anyone they are not, as who they are is theirs (and only theirs!) to own.

And so, reflecting back to that woman’s phone call to me a decade ago, and the audacity of her daring to imply that my child (my child!) was somehow broken, damaged, and a huge problem to a sane world, I say what I hope each and every ally will yell out to Helen Joyce and her ilk until they actually listen:

Enough.

So, it’s been a year.