It Starts With Love

Think about someone you love. Imagine them standing right in front of you.

Now think about why you love them. Is it their empathy? Their integrity? Their curiosity about the world? Maybe it’s the way they’ve been there for you when you needed them. Maybe it’s the way they always seem to know the right question to ask. Maybe it’s their weird sense of humor, or that one little smile that’s been etched into your heart’s memory.

The point is, you love this person. Which means you want to protect them from harm. It’s a human instinct as automatic as breathing.

My wife Karen and I have three children—if I can get away with calling full-grown adults in their thirties “children.” They mean the world to us and we love them completely and unconditionally. (Even when we disagree. Even when things feel a little strained. It’s part of life.)

But, can we protect our children from harm?

Not all of it, we can’t. It’s one of the hardest lessons every parent must learn along the way. We do the best we can, for as long as we can, knowing through every moment of every day that at some point it won’t be enough.

That’s a lousy feeling, but it’s real. There’s no bargaining with it or getting around it. Our children don’t live in a bubble, they live in the world. The world can be a rough place and there are people in it who fear anyone who isn’t like them, people who equate kindness with weakness, and cruelty with strength.

Our kids have to navigate this world, as we watch and witness.

Karen and I have three children. Two are transgender.

After decades as a news junkie, in recent years I’ve often found myself unable to sit through a newscast. It’s too painful.

What we’re witnessing on the national political scene is the oldest trick in the bigot’s book, rooted in human beings’ instinctual fear of the unknown: telling people that whatever is troubling them must be the fault of that “other” over there—the person who doesn’t look or act or speak like you. It’s the ugliest and most irrational form of prejudice.

Our trans children’s experiences in this important aspect of their lives—gender identity—have been very different from ours. There’s a lot about what our children feel and experience that Karen and I may never be able to understand completely. This can be hard to accept, but one of the blessings of being a parent is a certain clarity it provides. I don’t have to understand. Whatever else I may be experiencing in any given moment, those feelings are dwarfed by my love for my children. 

Every parent knows that feeling in the pit of your stomach when one of your kids is hurting. It never goes away, whether they’re five or 35. Today, the equation at work in our household could be described as the transitive power of love and pain. If someone I love is in pain, I feel that pain too. My children simply want to exist in the world as their authentic selves, without being punished for that. It’s the most basic form of freedom: the freedom to be yourself.

The last decade in America has required me to come to terms with a number of hard realities, including this: you can’t shame people who have none. My words here won’t amount to a drop of rain on the windshield of a genuine bigot.

But it’s also true that there are millions of people out there who find themselves somewhere in the broad middle of this conversation. People whose naturally kind and empathetic and protective instincts are telling them one thing, while a chorus of politicians and pundits and social media commenters is trying to convince them of another.

How can we break through that noise? I believe it starts by going back to where we began. It starts with love. It starts with a simple principle, enshrined in the Bible and echoed throughout history: treat others as you would want to be treated. Be kind. Be gentle. Give grace. Listen. Meet people where they are, even if the territory feels unfamiliar.

It starts with love. The rest is up to all of us.

P.S. It’s estimated that there are 1.3 million transgender people in the United States. Each is someone’s child.