Arlo (ROUND 25)

Let’s workshop this story (extremely rough draft) about a boy who is inadvertently groomed into a transgender identity by his well-meaning but ideologically-consumed adoptive parents

scent of the day: Anatolia Anatolia, by Prin.—

Anatolia Anatolia (2021, Prin Lomros)—an oud-intensified flanker of Anatolia (formerly, Turkish Leather)—​transports us to a contemporary Anatolian bazaar where, against the aromatic ambience of car-exhaust and sweet incense and ashy cigarettes intermingled with fruits and spices and herbs (creamy-caramel dates, honeyed apple, cinnamon, allspice, cumin, raki-booze-reminiscent licorice, bitter cacao, patchouli oil), we smell most predominantly the leather goods Anatolia is known for (belts, sandals, saddles) and the dessert it is known for (Turkish Delight or Loukoum, a confection-sugar-dusted chewy cube flavored in this case with rosewater and almond powder), the smoky-leathery aromas of the original versions (an effect of a vanillic-labdanum and resinous-oud combo that makes a similar appearance in Kerosene’s Blackmail) given here extra depth (enough depth to zoom us out from a tonka-rose closeup on Turkish Delight) by means of Prin ramping up both the Indian oud (minimal barnyard, maximal leather with hay-chocolate-coffee aspects) and especially the Thai oud (medicinal-tobacco, as is typical of this variety, but with strong burnt-rubber and automotive-grease aromas, which we usually get mainly from Laotian oud)—the overall effect being a sweet-dessert-meets-industrial-leather fragrance that can be seen as taking Jubilation XXV (honey, fruits, cinnamon, clove, vanilla, olibanum, rose, patchouli, oud, ambergris, and iso-e-cedar are the main elements they share) and, after turning up the volume on some Naxos-esque elements (cinnamon, vanilla, honey, tonka, tobacco, and cashmeran musk) as well as some Serge-Noir-esque elements (allspice, cumin, cinnamon), dosing in a good deal of natural ouds that impart enough of a sooty car-rumble aura to bring the Turkish bazaar (for better or for worse) into a 21^st century where camels idle alongside Land Cruisers; the overall effect being, in other words, a sweet-dessert-meets-industrial-leather fragrance that comes off much differently from a distance (the appealing ambience that others pick up) than up close (the rubberized intensity that nosediving fragheads pick up), a clash that in my mind evokes the image of a cleaned-up mechanic who (perhaps dressed for a happy ceremony like a christening or a wedding) still carries on his fingers the smell of the garage: from a distance the aroma is somewhat similar to Red Tobacco (which makes sense given their shared tobacco, cinnamon, apple, oud, vanilla, patchouli), only less bombastic and much more mass appealing (more like the smoky burnt marshmallow glow of By the Fireplace, actually); up close the aroma, especially as time goes on, is virtually identical to the spent-oil and burnt-clutch automotive garage of Andy Tauer’s L’Oudh, a fact that immediately makes Anatolia Anatolia a top-ten contender (since L’Oudh is in my top five, on some days even my favorite).

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* Bolded today’s work.

Arlo

Arlo is the newest lump of clay in the Thompson household, adopted as a toddler by Becky and Karen. Searching eyes, a gap-toothed grin, dimples like pinkies pressed into dough—he is one of those kids who invites hair-ruffling affection as soon as he enters a room. He is the kind of boy who never shoves past others on the slide, who hugs classmates when they fall. He is the kind of boy who, under different circumstances (say, if born in the latchkey era), might have grown into a man—a man, but one who keeps his childhood buddies for life (even if those buddies fail to validate his “lived truth”); a man, but one who struggles to send back an undercooked steak; a man, but one who flinches at the sight of someone making someone else uncomfortable (even if only in a book). But the 1980s and all its knee scabs are dead, steamrolled by the algorithm of the attention economy. No, Arlo’s world, orbiting the gravity well of virality, is a scroll-and-swipe hamster wheel. “We do Botox” signs in the windows of walk-in clinics not just on the coasts but in the heartland too, even the TikTok hands that rock the cradle twitch like cyborgs.

Becky and Karen are progressive—“progressive,” understand, in the modern sense: a jargonistic-doublespeak sense quite detached from more traditional connotations of uncensored thought, of dissent and pushback (no matter whose feelings might be hurt). Their progressivism, of course, is suggested by their lesbianism and by their zip code (just outside of Boston). But in line with the new civic religion, where optics matter most not only for social standing (your employability, what sounds your mouth is permitted to form, and so on) but also for moral standing, their progressivism is perhaps best telegraphed through their car (a Kia, for its humble anti-status) and their neck scarves (tartan, for a male-gaze-thwarting touch of academic rebellion) and—perhaps most vividly of all—their hair (purple, for fearless kicks to the crotch of “white dick energy”). Most in the fight—in any fight, let us be real—are opportunists, if only in the sense that distraction is better than staring down the etch-a-sketch magnet of erasure. But despite the hyper-importance of costume in the fight, Becky and Karen—“no cap,” to use the lingua franca of the day—are involved as genuinely as anyone can be. “In times of upheaval,” so a wise person should have said, “the costume will find you” and Karen’s t-shirt from her Woman’s Studies graduate program, which she still busts out on occasion, says it all: “It’s not what’s under the skirt, it’s the skirt!”

That hair speaks volumes in this partisan age. To an outsider—if such a person still exists—it might seem ridiculous (and one does hope and pray for such outsiders, even if it renders this tale pure baloney). But “deadass,” the hair alone tells us everything. It tells us, for instance, that Becky and Karen believe—and with at least as much sincerity as can be engineered through ideological hypnosis—that January 6^th was, in keeping with the shock-means-money economy of cable news, “an organized attempt to overthrow the government—an insurrection.” Despite the lack of governing plan beyond the vague hope of disrupting Congress for a few hours; despite the absence of an organized armed force; despite most of the so-called “coup operatives” meandering around confused and taking selfies like theme-park tourists (as expected by the typical dumb pop-music listening and pop-soda guzzling Americans they are, the same breed that once lined up for midnight Nickelback releases and so in essence the same as those who line up for GloRilla); despite the only death being one of these dolts (no disrespect) shot by a nervous cop, which under any other set of optics might have warranted a hashtag (a hashtag with the orcish subtext “It’s a go to loot TVs”)—yes, the hair alone tells us that Beck and Karen sit teary-eyed around the dinner table, fingers intertwined in the grief-clasp of performative remembrance, murmuring (even years later) about “that darkest day in American history,” that “most destructive act of domestic terrorism the U.S. has ever seen.”

The purple hair, the dyke cut really seals the deal, tells us that Becky and Karen view the BLM riots as—to borrow the media’s required euphemism—“largely peaceful,” largely peaceful despite the infernos licking at the backs of the gaslighting reporters dutifully reciting the phrase; largely peaceful despite the dilated maniac shoving a Gatorade bottle of 87 unleaded into the camera, looking like a cross between Pookie from New Jack City and Bane from the Batman universe, growling “We killin’!”; largely peaceful despite the grim realities hindsight should not have allowed so many to unsee (although, in fairness, their bubble likely never let it be seen in the first place): at least fifty dead, billions in damages, businesses looted and torched—the various rioting factions, all centralized around the race-monger lie (the lie that, given the reactive-spiteful nature of humans, insidiously baits reality into conformity) that white supremacy has reached unforeseen heights and depths of penetration (if only because it has largely become invisible). And this is to say nothing of the long-term aftermath. Sad as it is to say, the spiritual devastation (the attack on black dignity and personal responsibility) is arguably greater than the physical toll: whole districts rendered to third-world lawlessness (“No Justice, No Peace!”) as police—one of the last barriers between order and collapse in these crime cesspools—were yanked under the banner of liberation (“[Bounce dat ass] Defund the po-lice!”), leaving helpless citizens little but their deadbolt and their prayers—the disproportionate hurt here to black communities, neighborhoods deteriorating into something out of a low-budget Mad Max knockoff (only more fentanyl, fewer coherent villains), then insidiously spun (right on job-security-ensuring cue) as further evidence of white supremacy’s throttling grip, and more fuel for the anti-agential victimology narrative whose negative effects (namely, keeping black people down) is then spun by the same voices as even more evidence of white supremacy’s throttling grip (and thus further fuel for more race-mongered protests and books of Kendi grift). But the vicious cycle is fed, the narrative reinforced, and Becky and Karen grieve it all with the piety of true believers.

Becky and Karen both have cushy jobs, which they chalk up (between sips of ethically sourced oat milk lattes) to white supremacy’s rigged game—their white privilege a birthright they solemnly mourn and consciously “pay back” by supporting black-owned business. Although her MA is in communications (where she wrote a thesis laying out strategies for decolonizing academia and public knowledge systems), Becky is a graphic designer who works from home—and yes, she does walk the walk of reparative justice, always setting aside time for pro-bono projects benefiting “vulnerable populations.” Her latest freebie, for example, was designing the typography and layout of the sassy phrase “Nasty bitches over here” for a local black-owned sticker business. Here she fused—with the client’s full blessing, of course—the WAP empowerment aesthetic (a lot of dripping juices) with just a hint of Wakanda Afrofuturism (deep red for resistance, gold for empowerment, green for the land), but nothing too over-the-top because, in her words, “we all know Etsy’s white as hell!”

Becky is the momma bear, so to speak. Purple-hands earrings, hipster glasses, “Abolish ICE” tote bag, Dr. Marten boots, bangs self-scissored into that neo-Appalachian aesthetic of the folk band Mountain Man—she is the one who goes to the PTA meetings. She is outspoken. And her words have impact. Her words are often kind, nothing like the frothing rabidity one might expect from someone demanding that white bread be stricken from the cafeteria menu—and no, not just for its high glycemic index or bleaching additives or anything else not boiling down to bad optics. She makes it her duty to “call in” her fellow white people, a shepherd guiding wayward vectors of disease—like the time she stopped a mob of her equally-scarved lookalikes from banishing a fellow mother who dared ask, “But isn’t it okay to be white?”

Make no mistake, however. Becky can, as she likes to say (her tone as cringey as Kamala’s but her heart as true as Malcolm’s), “stand on business.” It was her voice that got a “demeaning and offensive” book pulled from the curriculum on grounds that “its beautiful Black boys and girls are drawn from sinister origins of whiteness.” What this meant, stripped of ideological hyperbole, was that the author was white and several characters were black—characters who, in her tear-choked words, “speak a truth no white person could ever understand!” So at least most agree (it is between her and some other ukelele-strumming white, both looking straight out of Bennington), She even spearheaded the campaign to retire the school’s sixty-year-old slogan: “Work Hard, Be Nice.” The twofold rational she drafted, and then read to an audience of eye-dabbing and jazz-handing whites, hammers home the gist of her spirit.

(1) “Not only is hard work a white-supremacist value alien to Black bodies, there is also a long history of white people controlling Black bodies with the traumatizing lie that hard work will pay off in some so-called ‘end.’”

(2) “White people have a long history of being offended by the native sass and wild bluntness of Black bodies, and so our school—which encourages Black students to disrupt the white-supremacist system that controls them—should never again participate in the violence of ordering Black students to be kind or play fair.”

Karen is a counselor specializing in youth mental health—and yes, she walks the walk too. Karen only rarely takes on white patients. The idea is that white privilege makes them much more resilient, much more equipped to bounce back from hardship and trauma, much more enmeshed in support networks that guarantee a bright future no matter what. Or as she might elaborate after a few glasses of red: “This country’s already structured to promote white health above all” and so—since “whites pose an existential threat to black lives”—“it would violate the dictates of equity-oriented healthcare to waste resources on them. There are just too many beautiful black folk in need!”

Karen had thought this way since college. When she was raped as an undergrad by a gang of black men in the basement laundry room of her dorm, she refused to report it. Her silence, in her mind, was an “impersonal duty to social justice.” To speak would be to fuel the machinery of oppression, to become complicit in the very forces she loathed: the perpetuation of the black-hyperviolence and the black-hypersexuality stereotypes, the expansion of the black-inmate industrial complex. In a nation “so hellbent on maiming and killing the Black body,” it would “violate [her] conscience” if she—however gashed, however flappy in places that should not flap, however many months she would need a sitz bath—were to add further injury to the “true victim in this case.” But if she said something, if she took part in “that disgusting history of weaponizing white damsel tears to stoke a lynch mob,” that is precisely what she would be doing.

For a flickering moment—while the perineal trauma still screamed, the jagged tear having sliced through muscle and even into sphincter territory—she considered redirecting the blame. Her white lab partner, a dorky freshman with awkward posture and hesitant speech, had a pasty body that—at least in one sense—could be made to fit the crime: militant payback, a counterweight to history’s scales. But she lacked the stomach. She also knew, in her words, “hurting white men only spells destruction to vulnerable populations, sooner or later.”

And beneath this rationale lurked another, subliminal but undeniable. Revealing it sheds crucial light on Karen, perhaps more than she could tolerate. She could not bear to disrupt one of the subtle but crucial counterbalancing stereotypes (encapsulated in the popular phrase of sanctioned bullying “white dick energy”) around which people rallied against white men. She could not bear to disrupt, that is to say, one of the critical BIPOC-survival tools (small, but the people must make do with whatever they can) to keep the genocidal tentacles of whiteness in check: the stereotype that white men have little dicks. Both rear-end holes were just too ravaged (nearly made one) for her to suggest that her white lab partner was the culprit. Weak, unimposing, small—white men had to remain that way. However much it conflicted with her often repeated claim that she does not feel safe walking past groups of white men (an attributional conflict similar to how the Jew, catchall brunt of hate throughout history, was cast by the same mouths of antisemitism as weak and yet world-controlling or as rootless cosmopolitans and yet clannish nationalists), Karen could not let the myth of white effeteness be chomped at too loudly (even if only from inside her own mind).

Animated by the tragic certainty that “the virus of whiteness can never fully be eradicated” (perhaps not even via Goebbelsian final solution), Becky and Karen’s contributions are small and local. But what more can you ask of them? Everyone in the neighborhood (geographical and virtual) drinks from the same Kool-Aid pitcher, its sweetness carefully calibrated: just enough to signal respect for “black ways of living” and yet never so much as to leave that diabetic inch of sugar sediment on the bottom, lest they be charged with culture-vulture appropriation (something no in-their-lane white—skittish, quick to flinch—ever wants hurled their way). These people all glug it down with the “eghck eghck egchk” of nasal-mucous “throat game”—even the men, in scarves too, with tongues out and mouths wide open like cucks. But unlike Becky and Karen, what they do with all that glucose energy is mostly talk—theatrical flourishes sprinkled in here and there.

That is no putdown. Few are saints. Besides, words are important in the fight. Spreading antiracist gospel—insisting, for instance, that increased contact with police has nothing to do with black behavior but everything to do with white pathology—serves an important role. So too does kneeling in an urban park to kiss the Timberlands of lined-up black men, one with a bullhorn color-commentating the event as “a moment of reckoning.” It could be written off as mere performativity, although the word “mere” hardly seems fair when psyche-pliant toddlers stand watching their cuck fathers—obedient to bullhorn directive—adding in some tongue action to the boot kiss (“nah whitey, get less musculine [sic] wit it”). But even were it “mere theatrics,” what are we if not symbolic creatures? For headcases like us—people who start the diet on the first day of the year as opposed to any other day; people who place the red-white-and-blue on the porch (well, at least before the safe-space hysteria of 2016 to 2022, when old-glory became as demonic as the swastika)—mere theatrics can be strategic tools (rallying cries, network makers, loneliness killers) for achieving real-world goals. In the boot-kissing event in question, what better way to show allegiance? “That your daughter? Yeah, get on in there sweetheart. Get on down right next to Daddy. Check Daddy’s work now. It good? Tell me, Sweetie. You tell me. It good? Well give it one little kiss for me, Baby Girl. Show me it good.”

It is just that Becky and Karen take it to the next level. That is the main point here. They do not just act out the passion of Floyd, ribs to the hard floor for nine minutes and twenty nine seconds, each year the horrible date comes by—the May 25^th brutality of Derek Chauvin, in circles sweeping wider by the cyber second, already starting to eclipse the April 3^rd brutality of Pontius Pilate (perhaps enough that one day, with the help of all the murals and tongues speaking his name, he too will be said to have risen). No, Becky and Karen are the sort who commission statues of “this beautiful black man”—forced, “like so many beautiful black men,” into a robbing-thieving-dealing corner by society’s chronic coon hunt. They are the sort who—not through the clacking Krylon of midnight graffiti but rather through the hammer and chisel of ribbon-cutting ceremony—scrub the names of “scummy white men” like Dewey and Emerson from halls of learning, replacing them with the say-his-name name of “that unwilling addict of the white man’s fentanyl.”

“Becky” and “Karen” are, of course, two extraordinarily unfortunate names in an era where white-bashing enjoys widespread social and institutional sanction—even as the reverse is considered, quite tellingly to the war on black dignity done in the twilight-zone name of “antiracism,” the punching-down equivalent of curb-stomping a mentally disabled kid. But they are good allies. They daily reminding themselves of the white guilt they should have, the way healthy people daily remind themselves of the gratitude they should have. It goes beyond the purposes here to criticize. So push aside the fact that the best evidence for the white supremacy they claim is rampant is all the helping hands and special treatment given out to black people to assuage white guilt (since it presumes that black people cannot do for themselves and keeps them on a plantation of dependency). And push aside that the second best evidence is the misplaced bigotry—a sick I-told-you-so bigotry, a race-hustle-enabling bigotry—stooked in the hearts especially of down-and-out white people (or even just white people fired from their jobs for talking back to or triggering a black person) when they see all the boosterism directed toward black people in a time when white is a pejorative and it has become fashionable to mock white people for being white.

As good allies, Becky and Karen roll with the punches that come merely with having such names while white. A coping mechanism as effective among humans is it is common, they roll with the punches by being the hardest punchers of them all. Letting their actions do the main talking (actions that, by some metrics at least, could not be further from these white-woman stereotypes), they openly say things like “I see no lie: Beckys and Karens do have trouble zipping their lips and letting black voices lead”—their tone here flirting with black-girl swagger, a ventriloquism of solidarity held back like their words (“do have trouble” instead of “do be havin trouble”) from crossing the line into the cardinal-sin territory of appropriation.

Becky and Karen pride themselves on their open-mindedness and commitment to social justice—or at least on what they mean by these terms, which lucky for them aligns with what the media and Disney and the universities and the rest of the institutional vanguard mean (a good position to be in, no doubt). They attend protests for racial justice and LGBTQ+ rights. Their bookshelves sag under the weight of SJW reading. Indeed, they have several books in the “Unbearable Whiteness” series: “The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Cartoons”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Geometry”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Weed”; “The Unbearable Whiteness of Nursing.” Their home, in effect, is a shrine to DEI: diversity, equity, inclusion.

For those not in the know, these terms must be understood in their contemporary sense. Diversity, for instance, extends no deeper than skin (or in select cases, if approved by the sanctioned judges, no deeper than lineage and self-identification). Inclusion extends to everyone, except those who dissent on core matters—a sotto-voce caveat that may sound minor until one considers that we live in a time when, still too tethered to our monkey origins, people sincerely believe that an artist’s moral failings retroactively alter the aesthetic value of his work. But the crucial factor giving these terms their ultimate shape, the key governor of how these terms are to manifest in practice, is the summum term of the trinity. Above all, diversity and inclusion must remain bridled by the highest ideal: equity. Since equity requires special treatment for those who are owed (who, in our times, are the victims or, more accurately and more illustrative to the Nietzschean power struggle behind it all, the sanctioned victims), now we understand what outsiders looking in might find more riddling than even Orwell: the fewer white people in a boardroom or classroom or movie, the more diverse and inclusive it becomes. Halfway, according to the new logic, is not as far as you can go into a forest. (The only exception is if it serves a social-justice end, somehow, to include whites. In that case, including the white would make the whole more diverse. A good example would be making a documentary based on a black killer but, so as not to perpetuate harmful stereotypes while also dishing out a bit of racial comeuppance, you use a white actor to play the role.)

Becky and Karen get out and get involved. They are cultured. They Netflix and chill like anyone else. But they also attend orchestras—complaining the entire time, predictably, about how white the musicians are, the “white” always enunciated with the pejorative sting demanded by the times. And while on the topic of orchestras, here lies a helpful illustration of the difference between “equity” and the term with which it is often confused: “equality.”

As Karen and Becky both agree, the meritocratic practice of blind auditions—long hailed, “due to the demonic misdirection of whiteness,” a major leap forward toward fairness—is actually a step backward toward black oppression and exclusion. As Karen puts it, “The dream of equality was a concession to white supremacy. Isn’t it telling that when MLK gave his speech none other than Lincoln was looming over his shoulder, seated there as if overseeing his animate property? Equity—redress for the past and persistent hobbling—demands special treatment.” And then comes the expected plug-and-play flourish. Neatly twisting the joyous reality that undermines her purpose-giving premise into its most pressing justification, cleverly spinning as evidence for the necessity of the antiracist movement precisely what renders that movement largely unnecessary (namely, the radical disappearance of antiblack racism at personal and especially institutional levels, even considering the current uptick in personal bigotry largely explained by the antiracist movement’s race-baiting and white-demonizing)—Karen delivers her final note with the ease of an aria: “Isn’t it the least we can do, now that whiteness has gotten more slick?” (The slickness she has in mind, by the way, should not be underestimated. One small example should suffice to illustrate the slithering slickness she has in mind. When the news showed CCTV footage proving that a black woman staged a hate crime by planting a noose in her own cubicle at work, Karen—without a second thought—said to the screen for all ears in the living room to hear: “But whiteness’s what got her to this damn point of having to scream for help like this!”)

Becky and Karen keep trying, because not trying would be complicity. And yet they expect little needle-budging impact from their activism. How could they not? They hold sacred, after all, the two dogmas that long ago leaked out of ivy-choked lecture halls and into every kitchen tap and office cooler via the pipeline of social media, two dogmas leaking out steadily enough to result in policy changes and right-think training sessions and mandatory thought-scrubs and workplace purges and doxing-swatting campaigns in the “real world” (beyond-cyberspace implications that make McCarthy’s witch hunts look like a game of telephone at a church picnic): (1) whiteness is a congenital illness baked into America’s DNA, which implies that the only way to cure this place is to kill this place (not euthanize it but slaughter it, hack it apart messily, as a scared-straight warning to any onlookers); (2) white people, even the best-intentioned allies whose heart hemorrhage has them on the verge of death, are likely to spread the disease just by living. Hence why it is imperative, like wearing a mask at Whole Foods in the era of COVID, that white allies always follow the lead of black voices. Although not a failsafe since black people too can catch whiteness (as in when black cops shoot black men or as in when Clarence Thomas simply breathes or as in when Louis Armstrong flashes that shit-eating sambo grin), following the lead of “beautiful Black kings and queens” is the least a white person can do. Never forgetting their place, crying during the black national anthem that kicks off each Superbowl and knowing exactly what Kendrick means when he raps “They not like us” at the halftime show—that is what Becky and Karen always do.

Becky and Karen are real allies. If their moves are “just performative,” then everything anyone does must be too—every Palestinian flag flown, every reusable tote bag swinging smugly at Trader Joe’s. Their white tears have long ago dried up. They have swapped out the white-woman Kleenex box for the white-woman Five Star notebook, scratching out thought crimes before they calcify into something problematic and scribbling down—with all the fury of a front-row student—black wisdom (especially when it concerns the main slice of that wisdom that they are technically entitled to chew: namely, how they are to conduct themselves if they are to march as proper allies to antiracism). Climbing the ladder of white redemption, they track their progress like boy scouts chasing merit badges. But rather than some embroidered patch, the true prize is exactly what less empathetic eyes might dub “ritual self-erasure”—a phrase that awake eyes say with much more cheer. There are rungs to the ladder, and they know exactly where they stand. “White critical,” their current station, means they have purged denial and now attack the white world order—if not through their Tesla-keying deeds, then at least through their carefully curated speech. They hope to graduate soon to “white traitor,” which would mean they proactively refuse all complicity in white institutions (“cops, docs, the whole rigged game”) as well as white values (scientific thinking, meritocracy, delayed gratification, punctuality). And perhaps—if they try hard enough, if they bleed out enough privilege (and funnel it to those who will never stop being owed)—they might someday close in upon the pinnacle: “white abolitionist,” which would mean they devote their lives to sniffing out and eradicating whiteness in all its cunning guises and slippery incarnations (micro sneer and macro choke). The hope is merely to close in upon it, as opposed to reaching it. For to believe you have reached it implies a disqualifying white contentment, a smug white self-congratulation, that proves you have not reached it. And, technically, the only real way to reach it anyway—no matter how many Trump-flag households you falsely report for gunfire around children, no matter how many food co-ops you help decolonize, no matter how many black children you usher ahead of yours in the ER line, no matter how many Teslas you crush with indigenous statues of infant-hungry Olmec (or, better yet, with overpass kill-boulders of highway comeuppance)—is in a toe-tagged body bag.

But individual absolution is not enough. Becky and Karen get that. Real impact—systemic change, gut-the-machine-and-scatter-the-gears change—cannot stop at personal penance. It must stretch across generations. The chain must be forged, link after penitential link, into an unbroken chain—an unending chain since, according to the antiracism hustle’s Machiavellian axiom of unabashed goalpost shifting, the debt can never be fully paid (only ritualized). If their public activism (self-nullification, social seppuku, hairshirt stunts galore) were not already praiseworthy enough, they go one better in the admirability department. They pass the torch. They prioritize their children (little disciples in scuffed Crocs), raising them to finish what they have only just begun.

Toward Arlo and Luna, that is where they mainly funnel their activist energies. “Social justice,” Karen likes to say, “starts in the home!” “The children—they’ll be the difference,” Becky likes to echo, sometimes misting up like a resume-to-heaven missionary watching her coverts light their first torch. Curing antiblack racism—well, more accurately (since antiblack racism can never be cured), pulling back on its bridle—is a biggie, no doubt. Becky and Karen do not just repeat (and repeat and repeat), although sincerely rather than mechanically, how badly whiteness rapes the black body and gouges the black mind and warps the black soul each day in the US—a falsity that enables too greasy of a gravy train, let alone too many excuses for failure and too many warm-fuzzy feelings of solidarity and too many tokens of moral capital, perhaps ever to stop being repeated by the intellectual and media vanguard. As if they were HR coordinators at DiAngelo’s Disney or Kendi’s Pentagon or pretty much any US college (dissent, even here, having become a ghost), they hammer their children in all the antiracist catechisms concerning how whites—good whites—must conduct themselves in the face of such barbarity: always let black peers claim first word and last; never talk over a black person, instead “zip it and learn”; never challenge a black person or make a black person feel uncomfortable (and say “sorry” if you do, but with absolutely no expectation that forgiveness will be granted even if coupled with the most groveling of reparative amends); always elevate black voices (“it’s the least we can do to in the harmful sea of white opinions, the deafening drone of white takes”); always follow the lead of black peers “instead of participating in the age-old practice of controlling the black body” (“otherwise we repeat colonizer sins to ugly to name”); always follow the lead of black peers, yes, but that does not mean trail them like shadows (they get sick of white faces all around, which is why it is important they get to go to the Wakanda Forever premier and not have their black joy tarnished by the anxiety of white presence); always capitalize the “b” in “black” but never the “w” in “white” (white, after all, is small and limp whereas a black is king and queen); never hold black people to expectations of punctuality or decorum or composure (“white clocks, white manners, white calm”) or any other white standards that might prove traumatic to black ways of living and black ways of knowing (“walnuts of percussive wisdom no white skull can ever crack!”).

Becky and Karen do know, however, to stay in their lane. They know not to appropriate, having long ago garroted the last wheezes of intellectual conscience—a conscience whispering that the notion of cultural appropriation is a semantic cudgel used by bullies, perhaps even an anxious guardrail used by those desperate to cope with their own borrowed swagger (basketball, for example); a conscience whispering that the notion of cultural appropriation, when weaponized in today’s fashion (where it is weaponized, insanely gaslightingly, in the name of “diversity”), cuts us off from the riches of cultural exchange (growth of learning, of empathy, of socio-personal horizons); a conscience whispering that the notion of cultural appropriation is, upon scrutiny, completely bankrupt: not only does everyone take from everyone and not only is no culture hermetically sealed, but more importantly no human is the buck-stopping source (the ultimate wellspring) of anything they do or think (or of any part of anything they do or think). Becky and Karen know not to overreach. What that means in this case is that they till the part of the garden they have most control over, the Buddhist saying applicable even to algorithm-curated gardens. They focus on child rearing. In their child rearing they sun and water LGBTQ+ soil more than BIPOC soil. Upon spaded and uprooted gender norms—that is where, in other words, they compost their karma. “What decent parent wouldn’t want to encourage their children to be whoever they want to be, free from societal expectations? What sane guardian would cram a child into some dusty gender box just because of what’s in their pants?”

Channel Becky and Karen for a second, although they would be the first to give credit where credit is due and say they are merely channeling the wisdom of black queer theorists. It is important to understand, so Becky and Karen would insist, the intersectionality of oppression. It is important to understand, as is perfectly summarized by the Thompson fridge magnet “whiteness hates queers," that the LGBTQ+ cause is not distinct from the antiracist cause. Queer liberation goes hand in hand with black liberation not just because there are black queers (a reality sadly erased by all the talk, however well-intentioned, of “queers for BLM”) and because everything—transness, gayness—is racialized (a reality that too often triggers defensiveness even in the most committed of white LGBTQ identities). Queer liberation goes hand in hand with black liberation at an even deeper level because whiteness is the slave master pulling both chains. It is the common denominator behind all oppression technically, which is why they also have a magnet that says “whiteness hates autism"—a magnet covered under dangling coupons, tellingly covered (so at least it would seem) given Becky and Karen's own blind spot when it comes to mocking Elon Musk for gestures and tics of thinking that ultimately boil down to spectrum disorder. Yes, whiteness might have “strutted its stuff" much more “flamboyantly" in the Trans-Atlantic slave nightmare (the wording here intentional to show how whiteness deconstructs from the inside). But we are dealing with the same beast. Whiteness—its heterosexual norm (gay is deviant), its dualistic framework (white versus nonwhite, man versus woman, straight or bust)—sits ultimately behind all the hardships of LGBTQ+ folk too. Wielding binary logic to split the world into this or that; wielding binary logic to oppress rather than to liberate, so at least Becky and Karen might specify to preempt the whataboutist response to their own razoring of the world into oppressor and oppressed (although when push came to shove they could always jump ship by blaming their whiteness for their erection of even that barbed-wire border)—whiteness is the chief force that has held back and ridiculed and maimed not only black bodies but also those who do not fit within heteronormativity, heteronormativity being “one of the many tentacles of white dominance.” As made clear by what resulted from colonial invasion (binary gender roles and heterosexual family structures planted without consent, like white stiffies, everywhere a white ship landed), whiteness is what opposes the indigenous mode of being—a mode of being, so at least goes the romanticized talking point, that did not peg love to man-woman blueprints (let alone rig life around that script). Shearing the native wild into the bonsai of “civilization,” whiteness is not just what says black bodies should be tools of labor and entertainment, but what assumes the same creed that haunted every missionary's erection and every colonial governors dinner prayer delivered “in those ugly belt-buckle hats of Plymouth Rock lameness": that sexuality should be vertical (man over woman), neither lateral nor even circular. Whiteness is not just what rapes the black anus and whips the black back, but what assumes that children should grow straight and that their junk should dictate the plot. That is the idea anyway.

Becky and Karen’s social circle is similarly progressive, cut from the same bolt of ethically-sourced cloth—never cotton, organic or fairtrade be damned, due to its inextricable link to the blood-soaked whips of exploitation and suffering. A few of their friends roll in Kias like them. Even more of them identify as nonbinary or queer, quick—as if handing over passports at a border-crossing (although with an attitude of “I’ll be asking the question here”)—to flash their pronouns whenever meeting someone new. Despite the eyebrow-arching uptick in transery still largely relegated to younger demographics, one trans guest does drop by on occasion for dinner get-togethers that typically culminate in wine taken to the living room where Arlo, face low to the throw rug beneath the coffee table (lost in the sauce of make-believe), mouths engine-revving noises with the doll he likes to use as a racecar while the stranger ultimately bleeds goth mascara onto the shoulders of her “new family” (her “new mothers” pepping her up by reminding her of the many times men have pulled over and thought she was a prostitute)—this “beautiful woman,” not two years prior a stubbled Locke scholar in elbow-patch tweed, having turned at nearly fifty years of age into what resulted in her own children throwing rocks at her Volvo as she backed out of the chrysalis of her marriage for what seemed mainly Instagram: a melancholic Lolita with post-punk attire as black as her mascara and combat boots and scowl but offset by pastel fishnets (often ripped) or green lipstick or even thumb-sucking poses with a plushie cradled in the crook of her elbow, eye-snarl selfies of enough Tinder-profile provocation (angled downward to spotlight fat-corralled cleavage) for her academic colleagues to picture the jugular insistence (that of a spoiled child doubling down on a red lie exposed by their parent) she must have brought to bear to excise the deadname from her ORCID and all her WorldCat entries and JSTOR bylines.

Straight-cis friends, just like Becky and Karen in the Wakanda world at large, have earned their place by demonstrating radical commitment to allyship. They have hoisted signs and marched for policy changes. They have contributed to Go Fund Me campaigns for those, sick of having to resort to survival sex work, just trying to gather up the funds to feel more at home in their bodies (bottom surgery is usually the big one). They have opened wallets and guest rooms. They have posted bail for protestors, hosted asylum seekers, and transformed their own homes into sanctuary spaces for trans youth who “can’t even enter a bathroom without feeling unsafe.” They have confronted LGBTQ+-phobia in public and private spaces, correcting relatives at Thanksgiving (The National Day of Mourning) and staring down even white-male bosses—dead in their rapist eyes—at job interviews. They have wielded their hetero-privilege like megaphones to amplify queer voices (while always making sure, however, to resist the urge—especially if whiteness stains their ally badge—to co-opt the queer struggle). They have raised their children, in what is the biggest contribution of all, free of binary cages (except for oppressor and oppressed, and all its synonyms and derivatives), doing so while always making sure to follow the lead of Netflix documentaries (casting a white actor to play a black murder) and scrub all non-positive representations of those who fall outside the norm.

Whoever their friends are and whatever labels they claim (nonbinary, genderfae, transmasc, demisexual aromantic, agenderfluid), whether their shirts say “My Pronouns aren’t up for debate” or “Decolonize, PERIODT”—through all the diversity there is an essential uniformity. It is that Disney uniformity that, in the time of the Gulf War (where the consumer base was outraged by Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait), meant the 1992 film Aladdin would feature a light-skinned hero (modeled after Tom Cruise) defeating all the swarthy-looking Persian enemies to croon Jasmine westward to “A Whole New World.” It is that Disney uniformity that, in the time of BLM (where the consumer base is outraged by the egregious manifestations, micro and macro, of whiteness), meant the 2022 show The Proud Family would script a black character charging a white character with “white fragility” for “being defensive about race” and then, after handing over DiAngelo’s New York Times Best Seller White Fragility (exact Random House cover and everything), directing him to turn to page 39 for some needed awakening about the various defense mechanisms whites use to avoid facing their inborn racism (silence, argumentation, certitude, and other forms of pushback). The fine details of the populist parables might differ, but George Floyd simply took a bird-watching stroll while black (as opposed to being out of his mind on a speedball cocktail, fentanyl plus meth, that perhaps figured into his cardiac arrest and, a few minutes before that, into his becoming a cuff-resisting Super Saiyan of basketball-star stature); the disproportionate number of women in engineering is about the white-male boot on their necks (as opposed to females tending to be much more person-centered than thing-centered); and so on. Whether over for lentil curry or out at the playground or out at a drag brunch (their toddlers handing the queens dollars while the mimosa-plastered crown claps and tears up at the decolonization happening before their eyes), their friends speak with one hive-mind hum. They all repeat, knowing how oriented Becky and Karen are to child-rearing, how “super important” (heads nodding all around) for parents to “Always affirm a child’s identity.” “Always affirm a child’s identity”—that mantra in the Thompson chamber outpacing even “whiteness is a disease.”

The Thompson home, no shock, is fittingly festooned. Instead of the stale rainbow of yesteryear, on their porch hangs the progressive pride flag—the new black and brown stripes signaling that the LGBTQ+ mission is enmeshed within the BIPOC mission (or, more forcefully put, that queerness divorced from racial struggle is just another harmful white fantasy). “Act Up” bumper stickers, purchased at a premium, scream from the salt-filmed Kia: “Silence = Death,” “If you ain’t pissed, you blind gurl,” “Queers Against Pigs," “No TERFs, No SWERFs, No Cops,” “Trust Black Women,” “White is the Color of Oppression”—the number of stickers growing like a fungal rash. The trans survival guide is currently on loan to the shapeshifting Locke scholar (along with Cis Tyranny, a book that argues that cis people who do not date trans people are transphobic), but the bookshelves still groan under the heft of queer theory: Judith Butler and bell hooks teetering tallest. Above the door to each bathroom, sticky-tacked like a mean-girl middle finger to binary’s rotting husk, sneers the Amazon sign “All Genders Welcome.”

Zoom in anywhere. Each trinket is sermon fodder. Take the “Trust Black Women” sticker for instance. Unlike what uncharitable interpreters often say, this does not mean trust all black women. Whiteness, remember, can infect even black people too. The attempt at the gotcha question of “Well, what about the one million black women who voted for Trump in 2024?” falls flat upon scrutiny, then. As all good apologists for antiracism know, the appropriate response is: “Those women were infected by whiteness and whiteness is never to be trusted.” And then the appropriate move is to throw a question back at the questioner, taking the reins of power. “We all trust our mothers in most cases. But would we trust her if she were possessed by Pazuzu?”

Zoom in anywhere. Each item, there in full sincerity, touches on heavy topics. The revolutionary juice hides in the detail. Karen’s tote, its weekdays slumped in Arlo’s school cubby until taken out for lunch, is case in point. “Nature is NOT binary”—that is what the bag announces, an iron-on war cry over a cartoonish cluster of mushrooms. The mushroom is a potent symbol in progressive circles, only one now eclipsed in the looming shadow of the black fist—not the suction-bottom black fist quivering in its stink under Becky and Karen’s bed each time the Amtrak rumbles by (and which is sold on Amazon as “The Gut Puncher”), but the ashy-knuckled black fist of protest murals and Instagram bios. The mushroom hauls crucial symbolic freight. Given its rhizomatic structure (mycelium networks—decentralized, mutualistic, soft—worming not only underground like so many marginalized and victimized voices but laterally and queerly in every-which-way offshoots of egalitarianism), the mushroom reminds us that there are alternatives to the arborescent structure (trees—centralized, individualistic, stiff—jutting not only above ground like mainstream and oppressor voices, the voices that would have skull-raped Harriet Tubman to death for her own underground work, but also vertically and straightly in what amounts to a triggering reminder of phalluses and hierarchies and Trump Tower). Much more importantly (and much more explicitly insisted by the tote), the mushroom is a rallying symbol of fluidity. Some species of funguses, in contrast to our one-way-to-bake-a-kid arrangement (sperm fertilizes egg), exhibit tens of thousands of different mating types—tens of thousands of different genetic lock-and-key arrangements compatible to yield offspring.

But of course, cherry-picking nature to justify ideology is a game with striking vipers coiled the grass. Nature, after all, is dicey muse. Hermit crabs eat one another. Mallard ducks ram their corkscrew members into the guts of their own dead brothers. Monkeys rape bullfrogs with more slavering glee than even the most brutal of slave catchers pistoning the sloppy eye socket of Tubman’s ran-through skull. Zebra finches hit even closer to the topic at hand. Reproducing only male-to-female (the only the sexes they exhibit) and showing no signs of gender dysphoria or spectral ambiguity, these colorful birds would look great on a rival tote bag behind the phrase “Nature IS binary.” It is also true that, while fungal mating systems show that binary reproductive strategies are not universal, they do not dismantle the following facts. First, barring infertility or developmental anomalies or situational circumstances preventing the capacity to produce gametes, every human either is male (sperm slinger) or female (egg dropper). There are no biological exceptions to the two-sex system: no third gamete and no cases of a human, as if some sluggy self-breeder, producing both gametes. Even those with mixed or ambiguous anatomy resolve, at the cellular level, to male or female rather than into some self-fertilizing herm. Second, reproduction can occur only between males and females in the case of humans (sperm fertilizing an egg). Third, sexual reproduction, even in the case of a mushroom species with thousands of mating types (and thereby with much more elaborate exclusion systems than we see in humans for preventing inbreeding), is still binary: either you can mate or not—no third option. The yes-no matrix might be elaborate in the case of mushrooms, yes. But it is still as binary as white supremacy. Fourth, rather than being sexes in any human sense (which involve the production of differentiated gametes and the coordinated anatomical infrastructure for transferring them) and rather than being genders in any human sense (which involve introspection-reinforced self-identification in a symbolic social world), mushroom mating types are more like software permissions or hookup codes that say merely whether a fungus can fuse with another fungus. Fifth, even if a mushroom species could be said to have in the human sense a thousand different sexes and thousand different genders, that would tell us nothing about how many sexes humans have (let alone about how reproduction works in humans) and it would tell us nothing about how many genders humans have (let alone about how gender roles work in human society).

The thing is, this is a post-truth era where logic and science are the white-man’s whip. A reaction to the “epistemic trauma” of being expected to defend one views with reasons that ideally will move any rational agent (another white standard), we find ourselves—more precisely—in a my-truth era. Personal feelings have become guides to reality. Indeed, and in an effort to “decolonize academia” the way that we “decolonize cafeterias” by removing white bread from the menu, lived experience—discounting, of course, the lived experience of oppressors—even trumps peer review. As dark as it might at first seem (since there would be no way to arbitrate between flat-earthers and hollow-earthers, let alone—and as if pop music and fast food were not already bad enough—to grow adults who could compete intellectually with third graders in China), this situation comes with a pretty fat silver lining. For, assuming the reality of an inner conscience, outside of a my-truth era it would seem difficult—difficult even for the trout-lipped superstitious space cadets among us, even for the Kardashian-TV drunk shells for whom (whatever wokeness they might mouth) Trump is the perfect president—to throw Socrates and Shakespeare on the Fahreinheit-451 bonfire for no more than being “dead white males.”

The above critical points about the mushroom symbol do not matter much, then—at least as far as people like Becky and Karen are concerned. Indeed, those critical points should be curb-stomped like bigoted brains into liverwurst if they are put in service of maintaining the status quo of white patriarchy—if they are put, say, in service of “blocking absolutely gorg women born in the wrong body” from participating in female track and field or powerlifting or wrestling. Although even a mushroom of a million mating types would imply neither a spectrum of biological sex nor a spectrum of gender self-perception (only something more like, to speak by analogy, a million arrangements of electrical plug compatibility), it at least feels (for some) like it does. Even if that is not good enough, the mushroom is in the very least an A-for-effort metaphor for fluidity. Who would deny that? And who would deny that, however misguided, the Beckys and Karens of the world who use the mushroom as a rally for social justice at least have their hearts in the right place? The spore is love. Surely that counts.

However performative a jaundiced eye might find the décor (the slogans, the signage, the Xeroxed Audrey Lorde quotes curling beside the spice rack), the decorations are not just decorations. Mnemonic devices, creed-pulsing talismans, conversation kindling—all are elements of an extended mind in a household that throbs with earnest gab: about toxic masculinity (toxic like lead paint, invisible but neuron-warping), about gender fluidity (not just as metaphor but as metaphysics), and—above all—about the sacred imperative of affirming a child’s identity (no flinch, or at least no questions). Becky and Karen, to their credit, do not explicitly ram their views down Arlo and Luna’s throats. They are careful, thoughtful—gentler parents than their own. Even when the ball has been bumped and perfectly teed up, rarely do they take—barring PMS days, of course—the nose-bloodying spike.

One example will suffice. Luna once came home reporting that one of her trans classmates, Susie, is not being affirmed at home. Invalidation comes mainly from the father, at least according to Susie’s testimony (which, being testimony from the margins, always counts for more). The father refuses the name, refuses the pronouns, refuses to play along with the pageantry of becoming. Becky and Karen’s kneejerk thought, unspoken but mutual, is swift and surgical: file a CPS report (false in the gut-puncher details of his abuse, but true as all hell in the overall spirit of his abuse) and then—after a law-enforcement-distracting gap of time—slash his tires (nighttime vandalism, coincidentally, they were already itching to commit, given that the man’s car is made by another transphobe whose autism (wooden postures, evasive eyes, awkward gestures) has him doing “Nazi salutes next to president Hitler”).

But instead of going full vigilante, Becky and Karen reach for wisdom. They slow their pulses with a few rounds of box breaths, reeling it all back into a more civil script. “Maybe her dad just needs time to come around” or “Maybe Susie needs to appreciate the support she does have.” Becky and Karen even go as far as to speak in violation of their own core values, to speak heresy against their own ideology. Although couched in the innocent casing of Socratic question (perhaps designed, so a cynical mind might think, precisely to tempt Luna into defiance and thereby into more personal—much deeper—conviction, where ideology hardens into identity), they float the Devil’s Advocate line. “Could it be that her father’s reluctance is a truer validation?” Becky asks. “I mean, he knew her before she even knew herself!” “And why does validation have to be on Susie’s terms anyway?” Karen asks—asks even though she damn well knows, and even though she damn well knows she has said, that validation always has to be on the terms of those on the margins. “Could it be, just maybe,” she adds (pushing the limit on believability), “that this is a phase, a friend-group fad?”

But even though Becky and Karen are more careful than most about letting their children “find their own truth,” their values permeate the household in ways so diffuse, so constant, they feel like air. How could they not? Put aside even the bumper stickers. Put aside how their hair-pulling rage about the importance of hormone access burrows its lullaby into all nearby rooms with a vent. The values drip through the grout. They echo from the hollowed-out skull of every podcast on in the kitchen, simmer through lentil soup with audiobook wisdom from a black trans activist whose voice trembles with “lived truth.” The words themselves—“lived truth,” “my truth,” “find your truth,” and other seemingly let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom phrases of inclusion—harbor their values. To be fair, parents can never avoid spreading their values. Even the ghost of a preference—what makes Mommy’s eyes light up, what earns a second helping of praise—plants its flag in the child’s mind. Parenting is a kind of bleeding-into. When even a whisper exerts pressure, especially upon the impressionable, how could they avoid being vectors of contagion without quarantining themselves off as absentee parents? And besides, is it not precisely the point for a parent to spread their values, at least in some fashion? Otherwise rearing children would be like an artist creating a painting but without letting any of his own personality get in there. The case should not be understated, though. While Becky and Karen do not want to be authoritarian, while they must watch lest they reenact the white supremacist modes of thinking and parenting (thereby perpetuating the cycle of violence to all nonwhite and nonheterosexual populations), they do want to see their children be the change. Can you blame them? Can you even blame them for peering into their children like a sculptor might peer into stone—even if it means looking not for what is there, but for what should be?

Arlo draws a natural surplus of Becky and Karen’s attention. Despite what unfavorable eyes might think (especially the kind that, perhaps in conflict with their own costumes, go nystagmic at the mere idea of children seeing people in drag), the extra attention is not a result of some crab-finger sit-down machination. It is just organically how things have been playing out. And yet it does make sense. Arlo is the most different from the rest (being a boy) and, as the youngest (age five), is the least immediately legible in terms of how his selfhood will shake out. With Luna (age eleven), Becky and Karen have already blazed the trail—fumbled through the parenting dark; read the books; burned the books; settled into rhythms of affirmation and correction, trial and error. They are now better equipped, seasoned like a cast-iron (although not yet grandma-tier). And so their focus on Arlo sharpens with a kind of second-draft intensity. The urgency is less about “getting this one right.” Luna has come out fairly well, as far as they are concerned. The urgency—never stated outright (even internally), but so deeply implied by their worldview that it does not need to be—is much more about Arlo being born with a double smear, a double debt, that demands proactive mitigation. These dual liabilities, left unchecked, have been known to synergize into an oppressive toxicity that turns people of the sun into slaves. Letting them grow wild, given all the violence they inherently pose to vulnerable populations, would make Becky and Karen bad people—failed allies, failed mothers (architects of harm).

Arlo is a tender-souled windchime of a child, the kind who senses vibe changes among people like some sense that a TV is on way off in another room—every shift in mood, every friction-burst of silence at the dinner table, every blink too slow. Arlo is an imaginative child, the kind who lingers over drawings with the rapt absorption of a mystic scribing visions no one else can see or who mutters plotlines and narration under his breath in caped self-play—his own best friend down under the coffee table with his doll car or in his closet building elaborate Lego fortresses (fortresses for war but just as much, if not more, for diplomatic conferences and grand banquets where former enemies strike a peace). Arlo, in effect, is a hyper-focused and yet hyper-directable child, the kind who in the vicinity of a passionate jazz instructor would become the next Ronnie Cuber on the baritone (perhaps even developing sufficient embouchure control to maintain extreme consistency in the altissimo register, a longstanding horizon for human players); the kind who in the vicinity of a passionate math instructor would become the next Andrew Wiles of number theory (perhaps even formally proving that contradiction results from supposing that every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be solved quickly, a longstanding conjecture in mathematics)—all of this, no matter what path, as if it were his astral calling: fixed in the stars since before the little tuning fork, harmonic to whatever symphony surrounds him, even began sucking his thumb in the womb.

Arlo is quieter than most boys his age. Less kinetic, more watchful—he prefers creative activities over rough-and-tumble play, more liable to sink into make-believe than to burst through the playground like a buckshot of limbs. During his preschool hours, he floats—instinctively would not be entirely wrong to say—toward the dress-up corner, where—with the same casual absorption as other boys play two-hand-touch—he slips on princess crowns and velvet capes: no defiance, no self-consciousness. The teachers adore Arlo, calling him “such a helpful friend” and often leveraging him (albeit with kid tones) to get the other kids corralled: “Look how much of a helpful friend Arlo is being!” In a day-to-day of tantrums over toy possession, you can hear their implied frustration when they tell each other or tell Becky and Karen “Arlo’s just so Zen, so chill.” Ever attuned to the vibrations of marginalization, though, they do flag his tendency to drift away during more competitive games and that he will sometimes orbit as if conflicted. It seems quite telling that the lead teacher, Mrs. Carter (a Joe-Clark type veteran who, insisting “We’re all in drag,” has stuck to her guns about keeping regular story-hour visits from busty and bedazzled queens), even once scribbled on Arlo’s daily “Rainbow Update”—perhaps her oat-milk cold brew, atypical for afternoon, hitting a little too hard—“Sometimes it seems Arlo’s unsure how to cross into the boy-world without tearing something inside.”

Becky and Karen notice Arlo’s preference for “feminine" activities and are delighted. Becky, in particular, lights up like a jackal at what she considers “an early sign that Arlo is breaking free from the jailcell of toxic masculinity.” She is a fast draw with the iPhone (especially compared to her all-thumbs wife) and raises it up high to snap Arlo twirling in a tutu, which he likes to do not just as a matter of imaginative roleplay but more and more as a matter of flexing his pint-sized power to puppeteer toothy smiles of parental joy. Photos like these she likes to post on Instagram with war-cry captions like “Raising a boy who isn’t afraid to be himself #BreakingFree #SmashPatriarchy." The images, rippling through their scarved coven like a cup of artisanal chai (a little spicy, but warm and affirming), rake in dozens of likes and comments. “Love this! Let him explore!" and “What a beautiful soul." Becky replies to each with punchy lines like “White world order, get ready!” and “Watch this space, y’all—he’s gonna save us yet!”

The parental praise, the opposite of occasional, flows like a geyser of giddiness. When Arlo toys with Luna’s dolls, Karen is there like a hawk. “It’s cool you’re not stuck in boring boy stuff. I just want to take a moment to say how much I admire you for that." When he fingers the gauzy skirts in the dress-up bin, Becky says (cryptically, which is not to say “impotently”), “You know, I don’t think I ever met such a brave person!” When he pauses over the sparkly pink backpack at the store instead of (as Becky puts it) “that, ugh, so-basic boy color” (the word “boy” spat with the same pejorative venom as the word “white”), Becky lights up. “I love how you’re not afraid to choose what makes you happy!" she says, tucking down any creeping suspicion (more honest than conscious) that “to consider” is by no means the same as “to choose.” Karen and Becky, in general, respond with cultist eyes of breathless admiration, like naturalists witnessing a rare butterfly hatch in the wild, whenever they catch sight of, or at least think they catch sight of, Arlo tilting toward gender nonconformity—yes, even if this sometimes means (and we are all guilty of this, so no shade) that their mental snapshot of, say, a Barbie in a little hand ignores the truth that comes into resolution when placed in the zoomed-out context: namely, that the Barbie is merely being moved aside to get to the mecha-dinosaur set.

The self-esteem-boosting awe-dumps are well-intentioned. They are meant to affirm Arlo’s own independent choices. Many children do not get half as much Pleasantville-style encouragement or displays of admiration from their parental figures, sad as it is to say. It would be silly to deny, however, that the validation carries an implicit message that “feminine" choices are worthy of extra praise. There is—nestled beneath the praise—a quiet hierarchy, in effect: some choices are not just valid but luminous, special, brave; others are not wrong per se but dull, unimaginative, small. The signal is soft but steady: this is the kind of child you could be—and the kind of child we will glow for.

When Arlo shows interest in stereotypically “masculine” activities (trucks, superheroes, brawny cartoons with laser roars and neon fireballs), Becky and Karen are noticeably less enthusiastic—not icy, but still too cold to count as lukewarm. Karen might say, in her singsong counselor tone (as if representing the child’s own inner monologue or, perhaps, the inner monologue she wishes the child would adopt), “Hmm, this show’s kinda violent, huh? Maybe”—she turns the channel away from Ninjago to Powerpuff Girls—“we can watch something healthier, more creative." Becky, meanwhile, avoids “boyish" toys as much as possible. She never would say “No trucks in this house”—nothing so on-the-nose. But what gets left on the shelf and in the bins—either gender-neutral or traditionally feminine (art supplies, bead sets, unicorn figurines, dolls, dress-up clothes)—makes everything all too clear, especially when the absence of toy trucks is considered in light of Becky and Karen’s daily mockery of the neighbor’s own morning rumbler for being “toxic masculinity on wheels” or “typical white-dick compensation.”

Becky and Karen tend to avoid directly discouraging “boy" activities. To do so would violate their creed. But their lack of enthusiasm is noticeable. Their quiet retraction of interest, even worse, registers as a dark cloud for a kid like Arlo. He is, after all, the sort of person who would always have to talk himself down from taking a door slam that left him alone in a room, even if just the result of the wind, as personal rejection. Any child is highly attuned to parental approval. But call it a function of genes or of the early experiences and hormone ratios in the womb (nature, nurture, or some fetal cocktail of both), Arlo is especially attuned. He feels maternal gravity more than others. Not only is his skin thin and spongy as a psychic (sensing every shift in temperature, every flicker of disapproval behind a smile) but his momma’s boy sweetness is nearly cloying enough for observant strangers to mumble to themselves “Bless his heart” (and mean it).

Arlo’s kindergarten is steeped in “progressive pedagogy.” It is the kind of environment where jazz hands are used to applaud the story-time guest reader, more often than not in drag. It is the kind of environment where, as a matter of decentering the religions of “euro filth,” Yoruba deities (Shango the wife-and-kids-slaughterer, Eshu the war-instigator) and Aztec deities (Huitzilopochtli the sister-beheader, Tlaloc the infant-blood-slurper), rather than US presidents or Greek gods, wrap around the room just under the ceiling, their leering eyes recently covered by pro-Palestine flags. It is the kind of environment where the moldable sand of the sandbox seems to teachers a more appropriate metaphor for who we really are than the blond-haired and blue-eyed Cartesian self they learned about back in their requisite philosophy undergrad course, which was triggering enough (loaded as it was with dead white males) without the professor’s exclusivist orientation to truth with a capital “T.”

Competition, hierarchy, aggression are all to be scraped away (or at least painted over) like asbestos. For these—along with “objective, rational, linear thinking" and “quantitative emphasis" and “hard work before play"—are the core staples of whiteness, as per the laminated staffroom graphic entitled “Warning Signs of White Culture,” a graphic lifted straight from the website of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The merest whiff of such toxicities is sufficient for feelings-circle lockdown—tears, hugs, the works. What else would fit? This is a see-something-say-something atmosphere where kids, juiced by fuzzy praise, turn tattletale with the regularity of NPC dialogue when entering their field of activation but with the intensity of a zombie woken up from its slumped shuffle by the smell of blood, whining things like “Ms. Carter, Marco’s being competitive”—the word “competitive” here said in that empty and unthinking way, that othering and cudgeling way, stone-casting Botox-bloated consumerist mukbang ditz and her fagulously-falsetto podcast sidekick lob the word “problematic” as they watch Roblox replays of Dress to Impress: “No no, you can’t listen to his music anymore because I heard he was problematic.” Group games, called “collective play,” are carefully calibrated to avoid any non-pablum textures that might smack of jaw-strengthening winners or losers. Tag is halal (not kosher, but halal), so long as no one is “it” for too long. Everyone gets a turn being the leader in whatever game (fluidity of roles is crucial to dismantling the white world order), although the concept of leadership is rebranded as “communal facilitation” (a scrubbing as set in stone as the new name for the school’s gym: “George Floyd Arena”). There are no gold stars or sticker charts or other relics of a trauma-trapping meritocracy. But one could probably guess what there is plenty of: affirmations (“Thank you for your boundary!”), heart check-ins, and mandatory mindfulness bells.

Time itself is queered here. Whether it be story hour or lunch or recess or even pickup time, none of it is set in stone—one of many middle fingers, in effect, to whiteness’s tick-tock shackles. Aside from some key mainstays (like Ms. Carter starting each class with the rallying cry of static-identity liquefaction: “What does it feel like to be YOU, today?”), the day is quite unstructured. Kids, steered by the rudder of curiosity, drift freely between activities—station to station (well, equity hub to equity hub) rather than following fascist schedules or European pecking orders. Lunch happens when hunger is voiced. Nap is offered but never imposed: “Your body knows,” the aide will purr (voice as soft as a lullaby lobotomy). The alphabet, still something to learn, may or may not be taught depending on the collective energy of the room.

The teachers are trained to the gills in gender-inclusive education. And it definitely shows. The bookshelf alone—spilling bestsellers like Julian Is a Mermaid and I Am Jazz—could stand as a monument to the new canon. Beside those mainstays are thinner but no less lauded titles that champion chosen families, communal child-rearing, and nontraditional caregiving models—stories in which parents are polycules, pronouns evolve mid-page, and bedtime rituals involve affirmations about fluidity and the sacred rage of queerness.

Although it can sometimes feel that identity here is not so much discovered as curated, the teachers encourage children to explore “who they really are inside.” There is, in fact, a full thirty-minute block—give or take, big give or take (yet another local contribution to the war against white rigidity)—devoted each day to “Identity Exploration.” Initiated by a Pavlovian combo of fingered chimes and mood lighting, this often involves self-portrait mirror work: all kids encouraged, by vocal fry that for some reason always gets real fried at this point, to draw themselves however they feel inside—emphasis on the “however,” not just in tone but in pedagogical bold text on the dry-erase board (which is never, for obvious reasons called “whiteboard”).

“You can be a horse even in a world that says you are human. You can have a claw or a horn.” Ms. Carter—kneeling at rug level, modeling pedagogical excellence for her teacher aides—pauses in preparation for the freighted nudge. “And you can be a boy even in a world that says you are a girl. Because,” so Ms. Carter says (her Ted-Talk boom, stilted as it is, understandable given the watchful eyes of these teachers-in-the-making), “you can always change.” Here she pauses for breath, giving the aides (one of whom is still in school herself) a chance to study her posture like disciples decoding a guru. “Did you know that a clownfish like Nemo can become a girl in some situations?”

When Arlo slips a skirt over his pants from the costume bin in the classroom closet (a game he has been known to play at home in the glitter-dusted shadows of Luna’s old clothes), Ms. Carter dives like a seagull on a parking-lot fry. “Arlo, you’re a vision! Look at them, everyone!” A teacher’s aide (Ms. Carter’s main shadow) swoops in, draping around his neck a pink boa that shimmers dynamically in the sunlight like the magnetic flecks in her cat-eye nail polish. “Fabulous, ab-so-lute-ly fabulous,” the aide says, channeling the campy flair of the drag-queen podcast she binges at lunch (rhinestone glitz and mothwing contour, together with all the clipped squeals, luring kids from the sandbox and rubber mulch to circle and gape at her glowing screen). “O. M. G.,” the aide gasps, vowels stretched with neo-Valley-girl affect (that of Alaska Thunderfuck’s “Hiiieee” and “Byyyeee”) fried for maximum hype. Ms. Carter leans in, eyes glinting with a missionary fervor that would be touching were it not for the “touchy” images they conjure (at least for those in the know): Kenyan-orphan assholes creampied by the men that slip them Snickers by day, remote location and power differential and community gratitude making tight browneye all-too-tempting—almost owed, like a sacrifice—even for some of the most disciplined bringers of the good news. “I love it! I just love what you’re showing: all clothes are for everyone. Clothes don’t care who wears them. Is that your lesson for us, Arlo?” In a time before classrooms were being decolonialized Arlo might have heard clapping from his peers. But dutiful jazz hands, flicking across the rug like windblown candles, do the job just fine. And Arlo’s chest only balloons more with a dizzying pride when Ms. Carter shoots him a private look of solidarity, followed by a pregnant whisper. “It really fits you. It really does.”

It could just boil down to a jittery jolt of caffeine. Or perhaps it had been brewing all along (which would, of course, track). Whatever the case, Ms. Carter seizes the moment like an Aztec priest would the pudgy legs of a squirming infant (ready to split the offering to the ravenous Tlaltecuhtli, leering directly above Ms. Carter’s head from Arlo’s low perspective, right in half with bare hands like a Cornish game hen by some medieval king of greasy gluttony). “Arlo just gave me a beautiful and warm-fuzzy idea! We can make this space right here”—she moves the potted plant with the flourish of community theater, revealing a crayon-streaked corner—“a safe zone where anyone can try on any outfit they want. Can we thank Arlo for this wonderful idea, class?” Arlo’s pride—undeniable (what kid would not want to be the inspiration for a costume kingdom?)—is, if we are being honest, tinged with confusion. He lacks the verbal ammo to frame it this way, but the feeling is active inside him: he liked the skirt because it was shiny, not because he wanted to make a statement (let alone wave some cause’s flag).

At home, Becky—nudged perhaps by some of Ms. Carter’s glowing dispatches—begins reading Arlo books about gender diversity. Introducing Teddy, a bestselling introduction to the concept of transgender identity, is the perfect go-to, especially since—almost as if there were a sixth sense all along that it would come in handy—it had been sitting on the shelf like a prophet awaiting its moment. Using a teddy bear as a metaphor for unshackled selfhood, the book explains—in a kid-appropriate way, soft enough to dodge a cynic’s flinch—that some souls feel they were born in the “wrong body.” After finishing the book each night (and this ritual goes on for a good swath of time), Becky repeats a tender reminder—one so saccharine only a stone-cold ideologue could call it “sinister”: “And Arlo, always remember: being yourself doesn’t change how much you’re loved.” By pure chance (or not, depending on your frame of reference), Ms. Carter—unbeknownst to Becky (Arlo never says anything)—reads the very same book in class. She even pairs it with an actual teddy bear, and seals the session with nearly the same capstone, as if both were quoting from a teacher’s supplement that came with the book: “Remember, class, you’re loved—whoever, whatever, you choose to be!”

It is one of those sad misconnections, those tragic ironies of life—like the boy secretly toking a joint in one room while the father, wracking his brain over how to connect with his son, secretly sparks a bowl in another. Ms. Carter and Becky do not really know one another (and, in fact, each quietly suspects the other of not being quite progressive enough), but they live nearly parallel lives. Their shared vibrational hum comes through most clearly in their instructional style. Ms. Carter, for example, asks Arlo open-ended questions, the kind meant to plant seeds for reflection that might not bloom until years later; the kind that smells like overt brainwashing only if we fail to consider how spaced out they are and how much we—the good guys, the saints—do exactly the same. “Do you ever feel different from other boys—and if so, how?” “If you could be any gender for a day, what would you choose?” “What kinds of pronouns feel best for you?” and “Do you like it when people call you a boy—or would you rather they call you something else?” Becky asks Arlo similar questions, arguably in a slightly more padded tone (what some might see as velvet around a crowbar). “Do you ever feel (and it’s totally okay if you do) like you’re not a boy?” “When you imagine yourself in the future, do you feel like you’ll always be a boy?” “Are there parts of you that feel like they don’t quite fit?”

Becky does not push the idea—well, no more than a detective sweet-talking a frightened child into naming the parent the detective is already convinced has been doing the diddling: “So this bad person was a grownup, not a kid—so you mean someone older, like Daddy?” She is too sharp to be a sledgehammer. A child may not identify as trans or nonbinary out the gate, but these questions ensure they have both the language and the permission to poke around such possibilities as the years stack up. It is important, Becky gets it better than anyone, to ask without pressure or expectation. Otherwise one risks effacing, as if just another toxic goon of white supremacy, what gender identity always already is: a sandbox, not a scantron; a playground where the child has authority, not a test where the parent holds the answer key in one hand and a red Sharpie in the other. Besides, Karen would shoot her the playful-but-serious check-yourself look if she laid it on too thick. Becky can feel Karen’s eye, her ease-up glare, even when Karen is not there. That phantom stare is enough to keep her from going full ham-fist.

Arlo, wired to please his teachers and his moms (Becky most of all), begins—naturally, if hazily—to wonder if his love of sparkly things means he is supposed to be a girl. He does not put it that way, of course. It is not a conscious thought he can name, not yet. But latent, preverbal, does not mean unreal: a cat does not need to say to itself “I want food” for it to stalk the kibble bag. Arlo is attuned enough to register that being different, the right kind of different (the tutu-wearing kind), makes adults around him glow, their faces lit like victors in a long battle to get all the homophobic No U-turn signs removed throughout the zip code. However subtle, however tucked under pieties of “Let the child choose,” however buried “so that the child retains the say on who or what they are”—over the years, the cues start to pile up like damp leaves merging into a musty glow of fertility. No one has to say a thing. The weather itself begins to suggest what sort of child summons the sun.

Arlo finds himself, one afternoon at age seven, buckled in the theta-wave dreaminess of the Kia’s backseat, where the whole family stews in a ferric tang he cannot name—maternal cycles, synchronized, bleeding iron into the upholstery just like, coincidentally, the song that strums through the speakers: “Blood in the Boardroom” by Ani DiFranco, a feminist Becky and Karen play with a touch of guilt since she has softened her trans-inclusionary stance several times (in her memoir, in interviews) by voicing “problematic empathy” for cis women who feel displaced by the influx of trans-women in female spaces (bathrooms and dressing rooms, jails and crisis centers, rugby and boxing). Arlo’s parents turn down the song to talk about a local family whose child recently came out as trans. “It’s so beautiful how they’re holding her up like that,” Becky says. “Kids know who they are. They know so young. We just need to listen.” Tears bead in Becky’s eyes as she looks back at Arlo through the rearview. “Why can’t we just listen?” Karen adds, “Wish more parents were open like that. Imagine how many kids feel trapped by gender norms. Makes me sick." Then Becky adds—although it draws Karen’s head-shaking smirk and a teasing “Now don’t be bad”—“I mean, is a boy in a tutu ever just a boy in a tutu?”

Arlo internalizes the Kia chatter. Something in him receives it—less lightning revelation than nodding confirmation (as if a bell in his marrow had been faintly tolling for years and now, at last, someone named its pitch). The specifics melt away fast and for good, lost like a muggy middle-school July in the neural network of an adult with bills to pay. But especially anytime he catches coppery whiffs of menstruation’s musky drama (ripe as fingers that have been playing with old pennies), the moral gist revitalizes into unplaceable feels. With all the priming of the system (the books cooing “my truth” and the jazz hands flickering like cultist candles, the soft-eyed praise and the radiant weather always following his sequined twirls), the flower that starts blooming in Arlo’s skull—well, no sober onlooker would be shocked at how pink it would be. Look at it this way. Bombarded by a big-money narrative of persecution, witnessing firsthand the cultural capital accrued by leaning into that narrative, seeing how it entitles them to special treatment and gives them an out when they fail—countless black Americans (no matter how cushy their lives, no matter the full arc of the data) come to truly believe (swearing with the full sincerity of the hypnotized) that they are, and have always been, crushed beneath a white supremacist boot. Surely it is easy to imagine, likewise, a boy like Arlo—impressionable, hyper-attuned to maternal currents—beginning to think the thought that, at this point, seems like destiny’s smug told-you-so: “Maybe I’m a girl. Maybe that’s why my mommies are so happy when I wear skirts."

A few weeks later, Arlo—curled on the couch, kneading a frayed fleece scrap from an old pajama sleeve like a talisman—lifts a half-swallowed voice: “I think I’m a girl.” Becky’s eyes ignite. Her smile, split wide, beams like a gardener who, having planted the seed and watered it just right through the seasons (whispering to it through frost), now witnesses the first green flicker breaking from black soil. “Oh, Arlo, I’m so proud you told me.” She hugs him tightly, wrapping him in arms that try for tenderness but cannot quite hide the thrum of triumph. “You’re so brave!”

With Karen hovering on her shoulder (urging her not to be too outward, reminding her it needs to be Arlo’s—all Arlo’s—call), Becky reins it in. She even throws in a breezy backpedal (“like a fisherman,” so critical eyes might note, “giving the hooked fish some lulling slack”): “But it’s okay to be unsure. There’s no rush.” Such autonomy-honoring words of no-biggie reassurance, cloaking their pull in no-pressure velvet, could have been torn straight from the master manipulator’s handbook—a handbook, in all fairness, encoded in the blank-slate-mocking DNA of sneaky headcases like us: our primate ancestors, alive in our small and vulnerable hearts, plucking lice from one another’s fur to build quid-pro-quo alliances; using infants as de-escalation shields to trigger calming instincts in the raging male; raising vulvas high to shift the focus from fighting to fucking; fattening up a weakling with sustained food and care to lock in a loyal pawn.

Becky’s play-it-cool postures of postmodern permissiveness are to be applauded from a strategic point of view. Surely they are more effective than any blunt dictatorial bark. First, it sinks the “girl” whisper deeper by making it feel self-originated—more like the spark of inner light than the reflected rays of a star; more like a personal choice than what seems better to call it: “‘unintentional’ grooming.” Second, it makes it easier for the parents to mistake the echo of their own voice for the child’s own, effectively closing the circuit. Look at it this way. Being even slightly pushy would be a slander to all the hard work already put in to tilling the soil. It would be overkill, likely even to backfire. This is a household, after all, that casts gender nonconformity as inherently virtuous (“There’s no one braver than a little kid who refuses to let his parts define him”)—a lodestar any typical child would chase for a fast-track taste of parental glow (which explains why Arlo’s declaration seems less like a lightning bolt than the click of a final jigsaw piece). This is a household, in fact, where football flickering onscreen pulls eye-rolls, where Nerf-gun ads yank tears for Trayvon (wet and sharp as gunpowder guilt). If regular people (not just bored and lazy coastal elites, but even heartland folk) increasingly find it redundant to place the word “toxic” before “masculinity,” imagine how the Pavlovian coupling must land in the Thompson household where either word directly brings to mind the other. (Although to be fair, when push came to shove, it is easy to imagine Becky and Karen defending a non-redundancy thesis by holding up a figure like Max McCandles from the 2023 film Poor Things: a limp leash-trained cuck celebrated for letting the main character lead him by the nose and for not coding her whore past in any negative way—a radical tolerance, so goes the ham-fisted morale that locates a woman’s radix of agency in her heartless clitoris, anything short of which would signal a problematic desire to claim a woman’s body as male property.)

Cool as she plays it outwardly, Becky gets to business the moment Arlo pads out to the backyard in his glitter Crocs. She opens her laptop like a seer cracking open a spellbook, fingers twitching to start her research. It is not that she lacks resources—the bookshelf already sags with affirming tomes. Aside from the fact that longform non-screen reading is getting harder and harder for all humans (even relatively educated ones like Becky), it is more that this moment demands fresh ritual. The Google doodle of the day, celebrating the travesti activist Diana Sacayán, could not be more serendipitous to her mind. How could she not get all teary and sniffly beholding, on this very day when her child just hatched from its egg, the beautiful brown trans-icon with arms flung wide against a yellow sky, its rainbow horizon signaling a golden age where the stranglehold of whiteness has gotten loose enough for the multitudes within each of us to sing and dance if only just a bit. Sad as it will be for the image of the smiling hero to go away (“more woman than I’ll ever be,” Becky mutters), she punches “gender-affirming care” into the search bar and hits “enter” with the solemn no-going-back finality of a bride’s “I do.”

She means to dig in. She means to learn. But the electricity has her flapping every which way like a livewire. Soon she is ahead of herself, dreaming up girl names. What about Juniper? What about Opal? Opal would be a simpler transition. Becky refuses even to think the deadname from which Opal would be a transition. To avoid any hint of that name she opens a fresh Google tab so that she may see, as if a Catholic beholding a statue of the Virgin Mary for support, Diana’s beautiful trans smile. The choice, Becky knows, is not hers. Nevertheless, she hopes it would not be “Arla.” However obvious and symmetrical, Arla would be just too close to the deadname—too cursed, too liable to awaken some spectral version of the boy buried in pink. It would be, so at least she might have consciously thought if she gave it more effort, too much of a trapdoor for the demons of whiteness to insert slithering doubts. A few box breaths—eyes shut, chest rising and falling—reel her back to the patch of garden she can tend. And within the hour, having joined several trans-parent forums, she is guzzling testimonials and subbing for all types of newsletters. She even order yet another bestseller from Amazon: Raising the Transgender Child, the shadow of guilt for not already owning it standing no chance in the light of a bright future full of the most intimate allyship.

Karen, eyebrows spiked at first to see Becky sprint so fast, offers no pushback later that night. “You know my view on this,” she says, folding the laundry Becky would usually fold. “You know where I stand,” she repeats in hope that Becky will turn around from the screen and look at her. When she comes back in the bedroom after grabbing the pizza from the delivery man (Becky being too wired to cook), she makes clear what is already clear. “We follow Ar—” she trips over the name, which finally gets Becky to turn around. “We follow our child’s lead.”

And so they do—without pause, without audit. Neither mother dares float the possibility that the revelation might reflect, even in part, their own subconscious cues. That possibility, if it crosses their minds at all, never lingers long enough to take root. Instead, his words receive the shrine treatment, sanctified as pure signal: unfiltered, uncoached, uncoerced. Authenticity in a child, after all, is always taken at face value—so long as the face smiles, an outside critic might add, in the right direction.

Arlo, starting to use she/her pronouns in the safe space of home, is now called “Lila"—yes, Lila resisted going with Arla, but the two moms (always prioritizing child autonomy) let it be (albeit not without throwing out a few or ten alternatives). Becky and Karen, allies for their children first and foremost, tell his school and the school updates his name and pronouns in the system. Ms. Carter is secretly tiffed that she was not the one that Lila revealed her truest truth to—as Becky would have been if the tables were turned (another of countless parallels).

Although it might not offset the deficit that comes with being white, Lila enjoys the boost of self-worth. Lila enjoys the attention—at least at first. Her parents shower her with praise, and her teachers celebrate her “courage." But just as there is with the lovely Instagram photos of couples smiling on vacation, there are always darker parts to the iceberg. Deep down, Lila feels confused. She misses playing with action figures she one insisted to her mothers were not dolls but “men.” She thinks of them alone in the basement, personified but tucked away gathering dust nonetheless. She cries a little picturing them there. She is not sure, completely at least, if she really wants to be a girl or if she just likes wearing dresses sometimes. And when she tries to say, “Maybe I’m still a boy," Becky’s face reflects a sinking stomach but her words are gentle and affirming. “As I always told you: it’s okay to feel unsure, Lila. Gender can be fluid. Lila, my precious girl, you don’t have to decide now." But the message is clear: staying “Lila" feels like the path of least resistance.

What is most telling—what might worry some—is that Lila’s confusion is not an outlier. In fact, Lila is the exception only in how deep she has already been steeped in the Kool-Aid. For many kids, far less exposure is enough. The molasses atmosphere of specialness surrounding trans identity—transness as the fashionable stamp of personal uniqueness—would suffice, even without the backing of teachers and parents, to exert a Wormtongue influence. And that perhaps goes a long way toward explaining the cluster-bomb phenomenon Abigail Shrier has been warning about for over a decade: entire friend groups, in lockstep with online trends, coming out as trans.

Of course, you risk a counterreaction when—in addition to the affirmation bubble of glittering TikTok feeds—you sweeten the deal with teachers and parents who warmly embrace that very fashion. And given the glut of such teachers and parents in places like Massachusetts, it is no surprise we are now seeing at the middle-school level—and as their Discord DMs, For You pages, and Fortnite mic mutterings make perfectly clear—a backlash fomenting like a slave revolt: crude, cocky, pubescent, and destined, like all pendulum politics, to overcorrect into its own flavor of ugly—a backlash that flirts, unfortunately but understandably (since kids will be kids, especially in a country whose ethos is push-pull melodrama), with its own flavor of keep-the-pendulum-swinging bigotry. Consider, for instance, how many adolescents might have disowned the flower-child ethos had their parents donned tie-dye tunics and strummed nude protest anthems on out-of-tune ukuleles or had their teachers shown up each day high for tits-out cuddle circles, letting students—so long as they ask first—choose their own grades as freely as they are able to twist her pink bubblegum nipples to “explore a mother goddess.”

But with Lila we are talking an age before tween rebellion. Lila still lives in the shadow of Olympus, parents still close enough to the sun-summoners and moon-tuckers they were in toddlerhood—deities whose favor feels existential, whose approval dictates the very pirouette of the globe. It would be odd, the exception, for a child at such an age not to love Raekwon if Only Built 4 Cuban Linx scores every school drop-off and Saturday farmers market. And then add in what we already know about Lila: that she is the exception in the opposite direction. Her sweetness, her gentle porosity, her inborn sensitivity—these incline her, much more than peers at the crest of the bell curve, toward the light of maternal validation. How could someone like Lila not find herself oriented reflexively toward the North Star of parental approval?

Indeed, how could such orientation fail to be as tenacious as a compass needle next to a magnet, a magnet—reducing the tug of those on the fridge to dowsing-rod pseudoscience—so strong it poses the neodymium threat of damaging the compass itself (perhaps even shattering it to PTSD: Pieces Too Smashed to Describe), especially when we factor in that the approval feels allusive. For think about how much time Becky and Karen spend focused on pathologizing and mocking whiteness, fighting it like Jedi for the good of the universe. It pours steadily through the bedroom vents. “The stranglehold of white male ideologies is brutal, careless. Just look at what that asshole is doing to our health care: all prices up, care down.” “Whites destroy everything. It’s always that attitude of ‘I got mine, fuck everybody else.’ It seems baked in.” “White culture so closed, so suffocating. Nobody else is free. No one else is allowed to exist except within extremely limited ideas of what rightness is! And then what do we white people do? We make up stories about beautiful black and brown people, stories that have no basis in truth! Sometimes I wonder how I can look at myself.” The time alone, as any child of a workaholic knows, would erect a hurdle to deeper connection. But the hurdle towers even higher, the height of a track-and-field star’s surrealist nightmare, when we consider that Lila has to face white skin in the mirror each day.

The tidal forces tugging Lila trans, far from inciting rebellion, warp her like Io under Jupiter’s gravitational insistence. The irresistibility becomes only clearer when we consider the kids who do rebel in such environments. Digging their heels in deeper, their rebellion—their attempt to carve out a unique identity—often takes the form of escalation. Rather than clawing free of the bearded-lady morass, rather than fleeing the gender kaleidoscope, they opt for deeper immersion, pushing the envelope further in the direction their community already leans. Hence we see—now that the trans plateau has grown too crowded for distinction, now that the “girl in a boy’s body” feels passé (yes, even with the lure of easy gold medals and Wheaties covers)—a rise in children staking out wilder frontiers: identifying as neopronouned foxes and cats, as plush-suited furries with leashes hooked to BDSM-studded choker chains—the whole kit and caboodle complete with the requisite you-better-respect-my-identity-or-else cudgel to bully not just parents and teachers but institutions too.

At school, none of the kids tease Lila for wearing dresses. None of them call her “weird." Becky, hearing of the “othering” that happens in other schools around the nation, speaks to Lila as if such transphobia is happening to her: “Many kids will be unable to understand, my sweet girl. But always remember that you’re teaching them to be more open-minded. You have many social duties. This is one—a big one!" Lila feels trapped, although in the unknowing way of a person depressed by their routine but would never choose to end it and perhaps could never imagine stepping outside of it. Lila does not want to disappoint her parents or fail in the fight against “the white supremacist patriarchy.” She is starting to resent the skirts and the new name. These are not her explicit thoughts, but Lila misses being “Arlo." She—let us say “he,” since feeling trapped need not be verbal to be real—feels a quiet ache of loss when it comes to the old name. What child, however, would be daring enough to speak up—at risk of losing, or so it feels from inside a child’s mind, the approval of their parents?

By age eight, Arlo is showing signs of anxiety. He withdraws from friends, spends hours drawing alone, and has trouble sleeping. His therapist, a friend of Karen and who has been briefed by Karen (and who is already a specialist in gender identity as it is, having helped many children with unsupportive parents find their “glitter families”), interprets the distress as “internalized transphobia." The therapist encourages Becky and Karen to continue affirming “Lila." “This is time of uncertainty. Think of all the pressures pushing Lila to go back to he, to Arlo—to the false shell. If only as a matter of protest, as a matter of diversity, it’s crucial for you two to be the difference, the counterpoint. I’ve seen too many families abandon their children. You two are quite frankly amazing.” One interesting point of note is how the therapist handles seemingly disqualifying data to his ideological orientation. All adults, for example, know how almost all of their tomboy friends in the 80s grew up to get married and have children and in fact take on extremely feminine gender roles. The therapist speaks on this fact, which he does not deny, with tears in his eyes. For it illustrates, in his view how rampant internalized transphobia is. The data only increases his desperation to help young people before the social norms can turn them into closeted adults living lives of torment. “I mean, let’s look at the facts,” he says. “Lila hangs out mainly with girls right? Doesn’t that tell alone tells a whole bunch about what gender we might be working with beneath the anatomy? No, that is not a hundred-percent determinant. But consider all the rest. Stay . . . the . . . course!”

Arlo’s drawings tell a different story. They are filled with images of a boy trapped in a cage, surrounded by smiling adults who fail to see him. He might not understand exactly what is going on. Does any artist when taken up by the muse? It seems quite telling, however, that the cage—and yes, it is a literal cage—is always pink instead of the silver and black that are standard when it comes to Crayola kid cages. Karen and Becky, still unaware of their role in Arlo’s confusion, double down on their support. They attend a trans-youth support group where Arlo meets other kids who seem confident in their identities. He feels out of place but does not know how to articulate it.

With the blessing of the therapist and with Karen (the heel-dragger of the two) in line, Becky starts discussing puberty blockers with a pediatric endocrinologist. She believes that it is the next step to “Protect Lila’s future. It’s now or never." When she says this phrase “It’s now or never” she thinks vaguely—but quite tellingly—of how, after a certain age, the window of imagination and creativity closes down so considerably. She can feel the window closing. If some parents get crazy about making sure their kids starts the piano in such a formative age, just imagine how deeply it hurts Becky to stand before the image of the window closing. It is one thing seeing the window close on your child’s musical talents. It is another thing completely to see it closing on their very spiritual authenticity.

Arlo, sensing the weight of these decisions, feels powerless to speak up. The path, however darker it grows by the second, becomes clearer by the second: puberty blockers at nine and hormone therapy at fourteen and surgery at fifteen, these milestones sanctioned by a society that (perhaps mainly because money-hungry without much foresight into the damage down the line of things like fossil fuels and so on) sees a boy in a tutu as not just a boy in a tutu but a chrysalis waiting to crack into an ice princess like Elsa.

It is hard to demonize Becky and Karen. They are groomers, yes. But we all are. They are manipulators. But even plants are as they dig down for water and reach up to the sun, some even hijacking other plants and stealing their nutrients. Becky and Karen are grooming manipulators, and yet all of it was in line with the social norm—however much they, and others in their network, might have liked to frame it as against the grain to persecutorial degrees (something extremely hard to do once Disney is on board).

A vulnerable child might be caught in their ideological framework, but Becky and Karen are well-meaning. All their massaging of Arlo to identify as a girl was inadvertent, not deliberate grooming but an unintended consequence of their biases. That is important to say. It is also important to say that Arlo is someone to blame, at least in a minimal sense that perhaps takes some of the heat of of Becky and Karen. Being so young and lacking the cognitive tools to fully understand gender identity, Arlo finds it easy as a Sunday morning to interpret the reactions of his parents as a roadmap for earning their love. Being so needy of love and parental validati0n, Arlo finds it easy to follow that roadmap into an identity that feels inauthentic—and even if this mean getting the therapy and drugs and social reinforcement and procedures that will make it harder and harder to feel that this identity is inauthentic, which could lead to various negative results (identity struggles, resentment toward his parents, difficulty forming authentic relationship, depression, anxiety, suicide) at least on the assumption that the drugs and procedures and the like cannot fully eradicate any inner voice that questions the authenticity.

Keeping that inner voice quiet does seem to be crucial in this growing trend of gender dysphoria. It is easy to make fun of the people pulling out their hair and scratching their faces when they are not called by their preferred pronouns. It is easy to demonize these people when they try to hurt others for misgendering them, especially in the wake of the 2016 to 2022 horrors of all the employees and even professors who were fired without due process for just that. But when we empathize with these transformers, empathize with how desperately they need the world to validate their fantasy in order that—since we are all social creatures—that inner voice stays quiet, it is easy to understand why they would rage as if their lives depended on it. Because, in a sense, their lives do. When a fantasy is all that keeps you afloat, the world must play along—or else pay, bigtime, for watching you drown.

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