We’re going to have a chat.

When I was 4 years old, I knew I was a girl.
Not because of any knowledge of biology or psychology, but because that was who I was. I identified with other girls, because my heroes were women, I wanted to be a mommy...this never changed.
#TransRights https://twitter.com/BluskyeAllison/status/1303284396447928320

What did change, however, was my understanding of exactly how I was seen.
When I was four, I tried, in my child’s way, to tell my mother. I was shy & nervous about telling her what I felt & wanted. So, like any child, I started by dancing around it, and asking her a question.

“Mommy,” I said, “Would you happier if I was a girl?”
My mother looked at me and scoffed.
“I don’t want any girls,” she said. “I made a special deal with Heaven, that I would love my children, as long as I never have a girl.”
She went on to tell me how bad girls are.

I want you to try, very hard, to imagine what that felt like to a four year old.
Because the message I was given, very clearly, was, “I don’t love _you_. I don’t want _you_.”
And she repeated this to me, damn near every day. For fourteen years.

She kept on saying it, too, until I finally found the strength to come out, at thirty-eight.
When she caught me, once, as a child, playing dress-up...she terrorized me.
Humiliated me.
“Do you know what they call people like that? It’s not a very nice word.”

And then, puberty set in.
I’d felt like I wanted to die before, of course, but once I was confronted by this, I started making plans.
Here, let me share part of a letter I sent my father a few years ago, when I came out to him, too. You might get an idea of what it was like.

I had no one to advocate for me.
I didn’t even have anyone I could turn to for help understanding what I was going through, or who & what I was.
It was the early 90’s, you see.
I didn’t have the Internet, and there was not even a public conversation about the Trans community.

You have no idea, I think, what it was like.
I have literally spent my entire life desperately masquerading as something I was not. Living with a constant, anxious, gnawing in me, like a belly full of carnivorous worms writhing inside me.
I’d trade my life to spare a child that.

So, when you start going off about “leaving kids out of it,” what you are doing is saying, “I want children to be left to fend for themselves, to suffer in fear, shame, and confusion, knowing that it will lead to severe emotional trauma & suicide.”

Your personal awkwardness & discomfort are not more important than the well-being of the next little trans girl or boy. And using children as a shield for your selfishness is utterly reprehensible.
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Trying to exclude children from their own identities is in no way different than the cultural erasure practiced against indigenous populations around the world, by European colonials, and American settlers.
Again, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.