Arlo (ROUND 75)

Let’s workshop this story (critique, satire, tragedy, polemic, prophecy) about a boy, Arlo, inadvertently groomed into a trans identity by his well-meaning but ideologically-consumed adoptive parents

scent of the day: Maruyama, by Prissana

Maruyama (2019, Prin Lomros)—a medicinal-botanical vetiver fragrance with the spice-cupboard antiquity of a hermit living untouched in a mountain forest that, were it not for his foraging presence (talking aloud as he fingers all walks of undergrowth and overgrowth), is too naturalistic (too bereft of fairy whispers and unicorn fog and luminous moss) to be called enchanted—

opens not with a spa-grade diffusion of chamomile and eucalyptus but with a hippie-garden muddle of apothecary roots and herbs (sweet-pine marjoram, bitter-herbaceous artemisia, apple-hay chamomile, earthy-peppery angelica, dirty-damp spikenard, musky-vegetal ambrette seed, savory-celery lovage root, nutty-rooty vetiver),

the medicinal-meets-culinary pulp of pesto green—after being smeared against knobbled cuts of high-essential-oil wood (smoky-vanilla Amyris and dry-gin cedar), wood that seems to have been smoked in a rose-herb head-shop incense from the Led Zeppelin era of Tolkien-aesthetic counterculture—

left to radiate a boozy underbrush aroma somehow tinged (perhaps due to unlisted immortelle) with the strange spiced-maple saccharinity of an autumnal confection (an apple-cider sweetness that, although coming out boldly an hour or so in as the intoxicating marjoram dies down, luckily does not get too loud for too long)—

the overall result being a vegetalista-vetiver fragrance that has a surprising kinship with Fat Electrician due to the shared minty chlorophyll (olive-leaf-based in Fat Electrician) and maply sweetness (syprup-glazed-chestnuts in Fat Electrician) built upon vetiver, but is made much more appealing (I am not a big fan of that ELDO release) by what almost seems like a sweetness-curbing dose of the celery-and-herb forward Yatagan (one of my favorite musky bitter forest-floor fragrances of all time);

the overall result being, in other words, a garden-and-flower fragrance that, although difficult to see (at least in terms of notes) as related to Hokkaido’s Mount Maruyama from which it gets its name (the cedar and artemisa the only real connection I can tell), is easy to see as the signature scent of a reclusive herbalist (perhaps, to draw the Japan connection, we might picture a yamabushi, a mountain ascetic) who walks the walk when it comes to his belief in the hidden powers of plants to heal not only the diseases that have been here before humans (arthritis) and exacerbated by humans (Lyme disease) but also the diseases that would not be were it not for humans (phossy jaw), someone who might lament how humans have disrupted the longstanding homeostasis but still is wise enough to know that the disruption is nothing but nature’s own doing since humans and even their powerplants are as natural as bees and bacteria.

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* Worked on two smell segments today, bolded.

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—we have, in frame, one of those kids who invites hair-ruffling affection the moment he enters a room. He is the conflict-averse kind of boy who never shoves past others on the slide, who hugs classmates when they fall. He is the animal-whisperer 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); a man, but one who finds his highest joy and freedom in the homebody rhythms of Emily Dickenson.

The thing is, the 1980s and all its knee scabs are dead—steamrolled by the algorithm of the attention economy. The world in which Arlo was born, orbiting the gravity well of virality, is a scroll-and-swipe hamster wheel. “We do Botox” signs now winking from the windows of walk-in clinics not just on the coasts but deep in the heartland too, even the TikTok hands that rock the cradle twitch like cyborgs. It has become, under these circumstances, far less clear what Arlo might grow into.

Becky and Karen, Arlo’s mothers, are progressive—“progressive,” understand, in the jargon-thick doublespeak sense quite detached from its pre-Orwellian connotations: uncensored thought, dissent and pushback (no book burned, no matter whose feelings might be bruised). Becky and Karen, the antipodes of Camille Paglia and Nadine Strossen, are progressive, that is to say, in the conservative-czar-in-leftist-clothing sense canaried decades back in the patient-zero figure of Tipper Gore—a sense that calls for the banning of Harry Potter on grounds that its author is problematic, a word such “progressives” (these ideology enforcers in dissent drag, these Nancy Reagans and Phyllis Schlaflys in SJW scarves and Doc Martens and septum rings) have almost entirely hijacked. It would be hard to deny that Becky and Karen belong, in fact, close to the skull-and-bones core of the newfangled progressive circle, a book-burning core whose high priests—doctrinaire as they are devoted—seem stricken by the same fire-and-brimstone gene that puppeteered not only the paleoconservative enemies of art like Pat Buchanan but also the auto-da-fé tribunals who oversaw the public torture and incineration of apostates centuries ago; a Taliban-HR core whose rabid inquisitors actually insist—as if the genetic fallacy were modus ponens—that the book series itself is trash (plot-wise, character-wise, setting-wise, moral-wise) on grounds that J. K. Rowling—having said “exclusionary” things like (TRIGGER WARNING) “Protect Tomboys" and having even refused to disavow “white science” on the matter of how many human sexes there are—plays a part in maintaining the white-patriarchal power imbalance that can only be countered, as Marcuse says, by any-means-necessary illiberalism.

Becky and Karen’s progressivism is suggested, sure, by their lesbianism and by their zip code (just outside of Boston). But in line with the new civic religion, where optics govern not only social standing (who hires you, what sounds your mouth may form) but also moral standing, their progressivism is adequately 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). Their hair, though, is perhaps the most vivid tell: Karen’s salt-and-pepper gray and Becky’s thinning Crypt-Keeper blonde both regularly dyed, Becky usually in whole and Karen usually in peekaboo highlights (purple, for fearless kicks to the crotch of “white dick energy”).

Costume is crucial here. Would we expect anything less in a world that seems to have won the war on character? But bracket off the “Protect Black Trans Dignity” button pinned to each of their chests even outside of protests, uniting them as one force of good—just as do their tasseled tartan scarves: Karen’s a muted burgundy; Becky’s a forest green popping against the cream. Bracket off Becky’s white knit beanie, its wooly cable pattern a nod to cozy rebellion (and its coverage perfect to hide the thinning). Bracket off Karen’s little Easter-colored trans flag (no bigger than a Mai-Tai umbrella) peeking from the breast pocket of her peat jacket, a button-up utility number whose multiple pockets and duck-canvas material—popping out in all its blue-collar masculinity against the Mary-Tyler-Moore coat of Becky’s timeless chic—would suggest she worked in agriculture or construction rather than in mental health. Bracket all this off. Just focus on the hair.

That purple 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 yes, the hair alone tells us everything. It tells us, to cite just one of many things fueling their Marcusean fury to offset the white-male power structure through even the lowest lows of illiberalism, that Becky and Karen believe—and with at least as much sincerity as can be engineered through ideological hypnosis—that January 6^th was, perfectly in keeping with the shock-means-money stories of cable news, “an organized attempt to overthrow the government—an insurrection.” Never mind the lack of governing plan beyond the vague hope of to stall Congress for a few hours; never mind the absence of an organized armed force; never mind that most of the so-called “coup operatives” meandered about confused and taking selfies like theme-park tourists, exactly on cue for the typical pop-music-listening and pop-soda-guzzling Americans they are (the same dumb breed that once lined up for Nickelback, and so in essence the same dumb breed that now line up for GloRilla); never mind that the only person killed was one of these dolts (no disrespect), shot by a nervous cop (an act that, under any different optics, might have merited a hashtag with the orcish subtext “It’s a go to loot TVs”)—yes, the hair alone tells us that Becky and Karen still gather around the dinner table in teary-eyed remembrance, fingers intertwined in the grief clasp of performative outrage, murmuring (even years later) about “that darkest day in American history,” that “most destructive act of domestic terrorism the U.S. has ever seen.”

Coupled with the time period and geography, the purple hair tells us much more than that—the deal really sealed by the dyke cut on Karen: formerly undercut in the quite-telling Hitlerjugend style (shaved high with a crisp part and combover) and now molting into a mullet of Appalachian meth-heads and campus bureaucrats alike (riot grrrl but with much less anti-censorship punk and much more pro-trigger-warning meltdown). The hair—a transmission, a broadcast—tells us much more than that Becky and Karen view (like any non-problematic college-educated white liberal does) the BLM riots as—to borrow the press’s lobotomized euphemism—“largely peaceful,” largely peaceful despite the infernos licking the backs of the gaslighting reporters dutifully reciting the phrase through the pops of gunshots; 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 (“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 corpses, 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 pummeled into third-world lawlessness (“No Justice, No Peace!”) after police—one of the last barriers between order and collapse in these crime cesspools—were yanked under the drumbeat of liberation (“Take it to the streets, 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 fresh 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—loyal to a goal parallel, in the full irony of the horseshoe, to the goal of the white supremacists of their fever dreams: that society be structured around race and gender instead of character and competence.

Spotlight has been placed on Becky and Karen’s SJW costume. And rightly so. Costume is currency—a way to signal allegiance, avoid cancellation, buy protection, feel good. That attention, however, comes with a risk. For most in their 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 existential erasure—if only in that human-all-too-human sense, rather than in the much more petty grifter sense of trying to remain on the right side of the algorithm. But despite the fact that most people put on whatever look-the-part garb will help fulfill the mammalian need to belong, and despite the hyper-importance of costume in this censorship-grenade battle in particular, Becky and Karen are different. “No cap,” to use the lingua franca of the day, they are involved as genuinely as anyone can be. They do not wear the uniform for selfish ends. No, they believe the whole way down. “In times of upheaval,” so a wise person should have said, “the costume will find you.” And surely it did here. Karen’s t-shirt from her Woman’s Studies graduate program, which she still busts out on occasion for all its collar holes, says it all: “It’s not what’s under the skirt, it’s the skirt!”

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, an remuneration effort all the more admirable, downright saintly, in light of their belief that nothing they could do could ever get them, let alone whites in general, out of the red. Although her MA degree is in communications (where she wrote a thesis laying out, in the words of her abstract, “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. As expected from the fact that she places the blame for all black American failure not on black American culture but entirely on the shoulders of white supremacy, here she fused—with the client’s full blessing, of course—the Popeyes-meets-WAP-empowerment aesthetic (chicken buckets 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 Becky’s words (which she restrained on the fly from going full AAVE, keeping the “is” instead of using invariant “be” or just deleting it altogether), “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, 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, ultimately, to bad optics). She makes it her duty to “call in” her fellow white people, a shepherd guiding wayward vectors of disease. Once she even 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”—a “deeply problematic phrase” she describes as “all the more problematic given its Mr. Rogers surface.” 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. 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. After a few glasses of red she might put it more bluntly. “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.” It is telling, if only of how good Karen is, that she felt a subtle pang of embarrassment in saying this. For despite being in the comfort of her own home, some internal daimon—a sentinel in place to spot even the loosest flirtation with the no-no sin of appropriation—shot its head up like a prairie dog before she even finished voicing the labiodental fricative at the beginning of “folk” (a word she almost never uses, not even in plural form).

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. She refused to report it even though they sang the beginning of 1993’s “Whoomp!” (long old by then) in demonic enjoyment, looping the opening lyrics again and again: “♪ Tag Team, back again / Check it to wreck it, let's begin ♪” 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. Being exhausted, nauseated, by white identity is insufficient. It takes effort. 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, thinness). 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 embody a walk-the-walk sincerity so unyielding it feels almost unreal. They can seem like mythic artifacts from a more enchanted epoch, a single-entendre epoch, before the collapse of sacred narratives. It is as if they stepped from an age before Nietzsche’s divine homicide—before Europeans “unchained the earth from its sun” with their Galilean pursuit of truth at all costs to human spiritual hygiene.

One encounter during a highway protest, back in the race-baiting summer of 2021, says it all (distills their essence). Through a sea of whites and their signs (“It’s OKAY to punch NAZIS,” “END WHITENESS,” “By ANY means necessary,” “Anti-Fatness is Anti-Blackness,” “being BLACK isn’t a crime,” “white privilege KILLS / KILL white privilege,” “white silence = violence,” “amplify black voices,” “make transphobes and racists afraid, VERY AFRAID”), a black man—resisting the universal urge to go peddle to the metal, even it meant taking piggybacked children and himself off the bridge—got out of his swarmed car and approached Becky and Karen. He was a big man, his Newport-ash beard stark against his youthful shoulder-to-waist ratio. He was fire and sermon, grief and accusation. Their worldview, in his eyes, was a deluded one where negative underrepresentation (the number of blacks in engineering) and negative overrepresentation (the number of black in prison) was a function of oppression rather than skills and interest and the cultural values in which they were (or failed to be) nurtured. Their worldview, in his eyes, was a racist one where hierarchy should be built around group identity (genital junk, ethnicity, self-identification) rather than character and talent. He called them devils in angelic halos and their “care” a velvet noose: coddling black agency and dignity into a coma, on the one hand, and fueling resentment toward blacks, on the other hand—a deadly combo.

For all his fury, however, they rarely interrupted. Accusations of “Uncle Tom in a Nazi hat” flickered in their eyes, but they never gave it voice. Nor did they try to educate him on inherited trauma, on how centuries of oppression etched themselves into the black epigenome (passed down like a blood curse). They knew it was not their place to remind him, however gone he was in their minds, that the radicality of antiblack oppression today is inversely proportional to the quietness it tends to take on—an insidious subtlety like that of a sadistic bus monitor’s covert elbow into the groin of a special-needs child too nonverbal to get across to his parents each morning the grunting message that in our language means “No Bus.” They simply allowed themselves to sit with the sadness they felt for his confusion, for his infection by whiteness—a whiteness broadcast, louder than Regan McNeil’s crucifix pussy stabs broadcast Pazuzu possession, in his American flag veteran’s cap. They pitied him, yes. But their pity bore no superiority (a remarkable rarity).

Several surrounding white “women” in wife-beaters under suspenders yelled out things like “Stockholm syndrome!” And if there were black people present, it is easy to imagine them—especially if Jolly Rancher colored like Dennis Rodman—calling out thing like: “House negro!” But Becky and Karen focused mainly on calming the man’s ashy hand-jiving tirade—no, not for their own safety but for his. In their media-stoked calculous of delusion, his “beautiful black life” teetered on a razor’s edge that grew sharper as he grew more abusive—one wrong glance from a cop spelling more black death. Even Karen, despite the man ending with an all-too-home-hitting reference to Eldridge Cleaver’s use of rape as an insurrectionary act (pummeling white pussies to creampie extremes as a form of historical payback)—even Karen, who still can feel the stretch in her own nethers from more than ten years back and who still struggles (like so many gay men) with fecal incontinence and who still hears the sinister soundtrack (“♪ Tag Team, back again / Check it to wreck it, let's begin ♪”), prayed for the wayward soul.

BLACK ELDER (getting out of his car, blocked on the freeway by die-in protesters).—Why you “ally” bitches spreading this nonsense? You treat black people like we’re too broken to stand. You really think you helping? Now you gonna move or am I running bitches down?

BECKY (softly, with raised palms).—We hear your pain. But this is small compared to daily black death. Society needs to know: if black people suffer, we all will suffer.

KAREN (looking like an even more masculine version of Cynthia Nixon).—We’re just doing our part to make space for healing, for black voices. That’s all.

BLACK ELDER (pupils dilated, like he is tweaking on stimulants).—I won’t be hypnotized, bitch. I know your fucking agenda—the victim shit. You can’t stand the thought of my people leaving the plantation. Right? You want us needy. That it? You’d never spoil even your own kids that way—stuff them with candy, tell them outside’s too dangerous for them. You’d never do that to your own! Why us? You want us dependent? Why? So you stay our gods?

BECKY (hands raised).—Please—think how this looks. You’re a black man!

KAREN (continuing).—It’s not safe.

BECKY (coming right back in like RUN-DMC).— This must feel overwhelming. But you’ve seen what happens.

BLACK ELDER (taking the tone of Jim Kelly in Enter the Dragon, but twisting the famous line).—Right out a fucking comic book, I swear!

KAREN (as if this will be the QED splash of cold water to wake him up).—We’re white women.

BLACK ELDER.—Un-fucking-believable. Death—that’s all you see, huh? I’m just a walking body bag, right? Keep spreading that poison! Watch! You know how close I am? You bitches caught me on the wrong damn day!

BECKY (pleading, looking into the BLACK ELDER’s eyes).—Men like you are targeted every . . . single . . . day.

WHITE BYSTANDER #1 (white face painted with the slogan “Society benefits WHITES only” and in a t-shirt that says “It’s REPARATIONS not LOOTING” ).—Black people get followed the second they step foot in a store! That’s what’s sick!

BLACK ELDER (not looking once at the WHITE BYSTANDER #1, instead just addressing BECKY).—Violent-ass black people draw the cops, bitch—not white supremacy. Most the shit on us. Most the shit black-on-black. And you out here talking about “fuck the cops”—the people that save us?! Why you misdirecting my people? Why? So we never look inward? So we stay stuck in this loop: ratchet hoeing, drugs and guns? Listen, ya’ll white people playing the shit right fucking now! Listen: ignorance, self-destruction. That’s what black kids soak in—that! And what do you white fucks say? That we only fuck up and act like cretins because of “whiteness”! You love all that pussy-dripping gangbanging shit, huh? Set us up to crash and then point at the wreckage like proof! Who are you people?

BECKY.—Sir, you’ve seen what happens. Know your surroundings

KAREN.—There’s no healing in this.

BLACK ELDER (grabs KAREN’s sign, “Math is Racist,” to examine it closer).—This shit’s supposed to help? How? Lowering the bar don’t make anyone taller. Black kids are behind—and you out here saying it’s math’s fault!

KAREN.—Black students lag because of the legacy of slavery. We’re questioning a system built to exclude—that continues to exclude.

BLACK ELDER.—They flunk because of white supremacy? How fucking more bullshit can we get? Math is universal, bitch! How come black kids in the damn 1920s could do it?

WHITE BYSTANDER #2 (wearing a shirt that says “Dear Black Kings and Queens, get behind me when they start shooting”).—Math’s biased! Black kids statistically score lower on tests. It’s not about class but racist tests. How else do you explain why white kids from families that make less than twenty-thousand dollars persistently outscore black kids from families that make over two-hundred-thousand dollars!

BECKY (paying little mind to the shouting WHITE BYSTANDER #2 because he seems like he is more concerned with instigating than with protecting).—Math’s a Eurocentric metric. There are other ways of knowing—black ways. We need more diverse voices shaping the tests, shaping the standards.

BLACK ELDER.—That’s some cult shit. You telling kids they flunk because the system is white? It has nothing to do with black cultural values, what black culture teaches young kids and about how to spend their time or about what to do to gain self-respect? What the serious fuck are you on, bitch?! You sabotaging my people! You trying to cut us off from the rest of humanity. You the Jim Crow motherfuckers—you!

KAREN (kind, but holding her ground).—We’re about inclusion. But to include, we have to rethink the norms—most of them were built for whiteness.

BLACK ELDER.—Don’t talk down to me! I live this shit. I look out my window and see a black boy in pullups swinging on cops, bucking off shots with a fucking Lego block—and you have the audacity. . . . Nah, that’s learned behavior. Black kids raised outside this ghetto-ass culture and raised outside all your grievance bullshit (Caribbean, Kenyan), they come here and thrive—just as much as whites, better even!

KAREN (incredulous look of “You believe this guy”).—We’re challenging whiteness, a power that has for too long defined success.

BLACK ELDER (holds middle finger into KAREN’s face, as if to say “Twirl on this power, bitch”).—Give me a break! You normalize failure and calling it “justice.” You teach kids that hard work is white, that showing up on time is colonial. You got me ready to slap a bitch right now! Ball’s aching—believe it!

BECKY (nodding).—Sir, just get back in your car. This can’t end well.

BLACK ELDER.—Nah, I’m out now! Your spell will be broken. “You’ve been through hell. You’re going through hell. You’ve been through hell. You’re going through hell.” We’re waking up to the hypnosis.

BECKY.—We’re just trying—.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling).—Tell me. For real: why you spreading lies? You want to be liked—that it? Imagine you two bitches as some moms! Bet you’d ruin your own kid just to be liked! “Sure Bobby, have some more candy.” “No, you did nothing wrong. It’s your teacher’s fault.” Keep that poison in your own home. Don’t bring it to mine! I see through you bitches. It ends now! Keep pushing. Watch. Because straight up: I’ve been itching to clock one of you dyke-looking ally bitches. Y’all same white bitches been the problem since eighteen-sixty-fucking-one! Different clothes, same spirit.

KAREN (nervously looking around).—We’re trying to keep you safe.

BLACK ELDER.—What you people here for?

BECKY (angles her sign, “#MeToo ≠ Trust all Women,” slightly to give the answer).— “Trust all women” doesn’t belong in MeToo. It’s racist. It would mean trust all white women. That kind of blind faith got Emmett Till lynched.”

BLACK ELDER.—Oh so only trust black women, huh?

BECKY (flips her sign around to reveal the phrase “Trust Black Women”).—We’re centering black voices. That’s what this is about: trusting black experience.

BLACK ELDER (shaking his head).—But what if that black woman goes against the narrative? What if that black woman teaches her kids math instead of grievance? Nah, don’t answer. I already know the script. Then she has internalized whiteness, right? You ain’t centering black voices. You’re centering black puppets! Then kids grow up thinking that’s how black people are supposed to think—always grieving, never growing; the r-word their shield from any criticism, their sword to make all sorts of spoiled demands. Poison-peddling race mongers, that’s what you bitches are! Your traffic jam—that’s the least of my troubles.

BECKY (breaking character, all the activist affection in her voice giving way to human-to-human sincerity).—This’ll be broken up soon.

BLACK ELDER (unmoved, locked into fury).—Keep whispering “You’ll never win” so we don’t even try. Keep pampering us into a decay. Keep quiet when we prove menaces to society: smoking, drinking, cursing right in the McDonalds—walking right out the door with whatever from CVS. Yeah, just stand there and take it as we take your wallets, make fun of you, act a fool in every space. Is that the kind of mother you’d be—just let the kid do whatever: rob, talk nasty, have no manners? Huh, you enabler pigs? Go ahead! Keep telling us we deserve special-treatment because the game’s rigged. Keep telling us so we can drown out what we know inside: that your help is hurting us. Keep telling us the ball will never be in our court. It’s a goddamn poisonous lie. We waking the fuck up! No amount of money or positions or scholarships gonna keep us asleep. You can’t buy away dignity. The lie’s out! The gig is up!

KAREN.—Police could show up any second. We’re white woman. Please sir!

BECKY.—This anger’s valid. But it’s unsafe!

BLACK ELDER.—Your safety’s killing a generation. Black children not focused on math or Shakespeare and all the shit that can lift them—all because its white?! Your “help” teaches black kids that excellence is whiteness, that hard work is betrayal, that self-respect is treason. Nah, black kids—they gotta focus on grievance. The only damn thing holding black people back is the block—and your victimology hoax: twin evils. We get into college with lower test a scores. We can say things white people can’t say. We’re wildly overrepresented in so many areas—to our own country’s harm, in fact. And yet we need you to protect us? Huh Becky-ass cunt? Tell me—how you helping?

BECKY.—. . .

KAREN.—We’re not here to prove the system harms black people. We’re here to make it stop.

BLACK ELDER.—We fail—you say the game’s rigged. We fuck up—you say we couldn’t help it. You keep telling us we can’t: we can’t read, can’t test, can’t win—because of “oppression.” How about them Chinese kids who get locked out of the top colleges? They work their asses off. They got the talent to back it up. But nah, your fuckery handouts to blacks—they take priority! You want to talk about racism—that’s the racism. If I was an Asian kid shoved aside for some unnecessary quota, I’d be livid. If I was a hardworking poor white kid, it’d take a miracle for me not to arm the fuck up. Told he’s fucking privileged when he’s just scraping by in a society that mocks him—give me a break! You trying to make everyone bitter toward us, huh? Black people don’t need this shit done in their name.

BECKY.—Our privilege means we have to pay it forw—.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling).—Giving out degrees like candy, booting top candidates to make room for black faces—that ain’t justice. It keeps us distracted. It keeps us entitled. It keep us stuck. It makes black people a target. You ain’t allies! You’re handlers with hashtags! You’re race mongers. You trying to keep your jobs or something—or you just hate black people? Why you need us broken? So you can matter? Is that it? Who do you really serve? What’s the end goal?

KAREN.—We’re here to right wr—.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling, pupils spread now right to the whites).—And now my granddaughter’s school tells her grammar isn’t black, that math is oppressive, that this that and the third—all the shit that stops motherfuckers from living lawless in the dirt—is a motherfucking “white construct.” What fucking chance she have? What chance when her fucking dyke-looking teachers tell her she's too black to learn? What difference is there, for real, between a slave master saying “Reading ain’t right for black kind” and your sorry ass saying “Expecting black kids to read like white kids is racist.” Excellence ain’t betrayal, bitch! It’s freedom.

KAREN.—No one said—. Different standards—.

BLACK ELDER.—You say we’ve got a white supremacy problem. Maybe we do. It’s you: the people who go on and on about how we have a white supremacy problem. That’s the irony! You the white supremacists. If we could get rid of all your “help” and “compassion,” we could direct our attention to lifting ourselves. If we could get away from all your “protecting us,” there would be much less bitterness directed our way. Never felt thus close to becoming a black militant—more irony for you. I can only imagine what white men are feeling. You like a fucking feeder to destruction. Who, what evil force, do you serve! Tell me or I swear I’ll break this sign over you fucking dyke-ass head and run all you white scum down!

BECKY.—Sir, think of your safety. This isn’t a safe space.

KAREN.—We can’t protect you from the law.

BLACK ELDER.—Scare tactics have no place here. We’ll break the spell. We’re not targets.

BECKY (pleading, voice trembling).—I don’t want more blood on my hands. Too much black bloods has been spilled.

BLACK ELDER.—You’re not scared for me. You’re scared of me. You fear a black man who won’t repeat the script. Any black man calling for self-help, for accountability, for agency—you call him a sellout. You’ve made it heresy for a black man to want to stand on his own two feet. What do you get out of it? Who the fuck are you demon-dyke bitches. Who do you serve?

KAREN (tearfully).—We’re not the enemy. We simply don’t want to lose you.

BLACK ELDER.—You lost me when you fused blackness with fragility.

BECKY.—We’re listening. But—.

BLACK ELDER.—Keep spreading this shit to black kids. You’ll be dead. Mark my fucking words. No child is a social experiment!

BECKY (whispers).—Please. Please.

KAREN (starting up a chant that soon fizzles out).—Cops kill black men. Cops kill black men.

BLACK ELDER (casting his eyes around at the many whites, several of whom at the sound of the chant assumed the position they had been in a few moments earlier: lying down in honor of all the “beautiful black kings and queens” struck down by the “Klansmen in blue”).—And you keep saying that, don’t you? Like it’s a spell. Watch, bitch. Watch!

BECKY (showing a rare glimmer of frustration).—Don’t you see what’s happening, each day, to your brothers! What about George Floyd?

BLACK ELDER (white-gunk building in his lip corners and his pupils wide as methamphetamine, a potential irony given what he has to say).—My brother? That was a junkie piece of trash—a thug. You build statues to that? What next? You gonna fund song that glorify being drug-addicted gangbanger hoes? Oh wait, I forgot. Percocet-popping, gun-toting—do you even care if black kids mimic that? I think you want them to. Don’t shake your Becky-ass head. You want them to, just so you can say “See: look what white supremacy did!”

KAREN.—Sir.

BLACK ELDER.—A black student gets called out for acting a fool, a black worker gets fired—racism, discrimination. Black kids show no respect, no discipline—you call it white supremacy. This a fucking psyop mission, bitch? No wonder we lag behind. Every fuck-up comes with a ready-made scapegoat. We don’t have to improve. We can keep with all the orcish crip-baby WAP pill-popping shit. We don’t have to reflect. All we gotta do is point and cry. You used to call us “animals.” Now you call us “infants.” “Oh little black boy, nothing’s your fault: the world’s against you. You’re owed. You’re sacred!” That’s your love? It’s twisted. It’s racist rot. At least in the worst of times we fought for respect. Now your demon hypnosis has us begging for excuses. Fuck that.

KAREN.—I can’t pretend to know what you’ve been though.

BLACK ELDER.—I’ve been through enough. Can’t even listen to NPR no more without hearing this victim shit! We flip to the bitch right now and it’ll be a boo-hoo about how we have to tell black kids to be on their best behavior around cops. Ratchet-thug culture’s out to get them, not the fucking cops! Can’t escape you fucks no matter what we do. Now I can’t even get to my fucking job! And who’s gonna pay for that? Me. Me!

BECKY.—We’re only trying to do our small part.

BLACK ELDER.—Fucking clueless canceler cunts: you’re stoking a race war! You trying to bait white people to lash out—just so you can say “See, told ya so.” Thank God you headcase bitches don’t have kids. I’d hate to grow up white in your home. Suicide rate going way up in the bitch!

BECKY.—Please sir, cops will come.

BLACK ELDER.—You’re a cow-faced man-looking pig. You know that?

BECKY.—You’re in danger, literally. Recognize where we are.

BLACK ELDER.—Victimhood is not the beating heart of black identity. We’re done with your lies. I’m nobody’s broken puppet. You’re on notice, bitch! Keep trying to lock us in bitterness, ingratitude. Keep stoking bigotry in white people. Keep at it! Watch what happens then, cunt! I’ll die for this shit! Hear me bitch?!

KAREN (spotting a “sidewalk nazi” in bike shorts, a cop that looks like the fagulous cop on the show Reno 911).—There’s a cop. See?

BLACK ELDER.—We have a present, a now, to be grateful for. You know damn well how many white kids pray to be black. They Wu-Tang asses been praying since the 90s! Bet your pasty asses crossed your fingers on 23andMe. But still, you try your best to keep us locked in the past. Instigate and instigate. You back white people into a corner. They hadn’t thought racially like this in a damn generation! But you instigating cunts drag it all back like there’s money to be made in it. And no doubt there is. But that money, that feel-good purpose—is it worth a race war: neighbor versus neighbor, blood in the streets? Blacks already tearing each other apart. Look at Chicago, Detroit—bodies piling up, and that’s us doing it. We don’t need white people after us too. How does it end good for me?! How does it end good for my people, my family?!

BECKY.— We can’t imagine what it’s like for you.

BLACK ELDER.—Don’t play dumb. You’re poking a beast. Blacks been walking all over white folks for years: intimidation, muggings, mockery.

KAREN.—But what provoked—.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling).—They rob white people and rap about it.

KAREN.—How many of them were instig—.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling).—They scream “cracker this, cracker that.” They blast songs—“beat it up nigga”—on streets, in parks. Can’t a family have a motherfucking picnic without all the dripping pussies and murder?

KAREN (visibly frustrated by the BLACK ELDER’s ignorance).—Black joy has long a problem in this country.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling).—White people can’t even walk down certain streets. But what happens if they say that? What happens if they even show some nervousness? What happens if they cross the street to avoid any issue? They’re racist. Whites can’t wear these sneakers or those braids without being called out or jumped. And yet it’s all fine and dandy for blacks. On regular fucking TV we hear “white dick energy this and white boy that.” You bitches know damn well what would happen if a white person called a black man “boy.” He’d be done before lunch—beaten down over here, fired over there. It ain’t just the hood. It’s suburbs, schools—everywhere. White kids get bullied for their skin color: “kill yoself, kill yoself”—little kids, some so ashamed they’re found fucking hanging in a closet. What—gonna say it’s payback?

KAREN.—I want to know what prompted the so-called bullying. Too often the root is white people having a problem with black joy. That’s why—.

BLACK ELDER (steamrolling).—Those same white kids grow up muzzled. They’re fired for a word. They walk on eggshells. And when they’re stressed about it, you slap a label on it: “white fragility.” It’s a sick mind game. White folks watch less-qualified blacks get the scholarship, the promotion, the diversity bonus. They just got to sit back and watch all the preferential treatment—welfare, scholarships, business grants, general leniency. And if they feel any type of way about it, they’re racist. They’re told to shut up and take it! Black comics roast white folks all day. But a white guy makes a black joke—or even forgets to capitalize the “B” in his damn email—and he’s done. Black student groups demand “safe spaces” and kick white kids off campus for a “Day of Absence” and have black-only graduations where they can hoot and holler and twerk and play songs about pussies foaming with Percocet. But what if white students tried that? They’d be Nazis! Tell me I’m wrong, cunt! Tell me!

BECKY (looking at KAREN).—. . .

KAREN.—What you’re not seeing is the power differential. Black people don’t have the power. It takes power to be racist.

BLACK ELDER.—Keep flapping. You know damn well who has the power. I’m only able to say this shit because I’m black. If a white man approached you like this he’d be beaten down and unemployable. Shit, I bet a black kid could straight up stab some white kid, right on school property with a damn knife, and the school would still call his name on graduation and award him a diploma. It would be a whole thing. He’d be made the victim! The real victim’s family harassed, no one doing anything to stop it—even cops—in fear of getting the new scarlet letter. I see it in my vision clear as day. Shit, it probably already happened! And if the roles were reversed? You know damn well. Black people would be looting and you’d be right there egging them on. You just want to twist that knife, huh?

KAREN.—Listen—.

BLACK ELDER.—All the black degeneracy white people have to deal with, all the cretin behavior—not only do white people have to be bullied and disrupted and tormented, they’re told they’re to blame for it. It’s a psychological attack.

BECKY.—We can’t hear you if you’re dead or in jail.

BLACK ELDER.—If I’m exhausted by black American culture (the violence, the music, the endless grievance, the domination of whites, the excuses, the sexuality, the entitlement, the bullying, the moral depravity, the glorification of sex and drugs)—if I am, how the fuck you think white people feel!

BECKY.—I’m white and—.

KAREN (cutting BECKY off).—White feelings have been the focus for far too long. That’s—.

BLACK ELDER.—Whites are the fucking majority! Remember that. TV might be full of black, but don’t get the numbers twisted. How long are white men gonna take being told their villains—even the poor ones in trailers. I’d be all fucked up on pills like them too, hearing all this shit everyday! But for real: how long they gonna take being told they hold all the power and the guilt. Everywhere they look it’s black this black that. Everywhere they turn they find themselves the butt of the joke and told that they’re the problem. What happens if the fentanyl ain’t enough to kill the pain? What happens when they snap? All your lies about it being open season on blacks—what’s gonna happen when white people finally do make it open season? You’re playing with fire! There’s a fucking well-armed rural white population, and it understands—correctly—that is it being lied to about having all the power: muzzled, struggling to get jobs unless they toe the line. Many of these motherfuckers can live off the land! How’re spoiled black ratchet people gonna handle that? There’s no twerking out of that! You got a majority population fully locked and loaded that understands correctly—correctly, bitch!—that it's being mocked and targeted in the society at large. Everywhere white people look they find people saying they’re guilty—guilty of all sorts of things they are not guilty of, not guilty of yet—yet, you cunts! You have put me and my family in danger!

KAREN.—This country has long been at war with black people.

WHITE BYSTANDER #3 (an old woman with a wispy beard finally interjecting after listening in the whole while with a wise person’s look of grace).—What we feel now as white people is nothing compared to what black people live with every day they wake up. It’s about time we feel some of the trauma. And is it really that bad for white people? At least they don’t get choked, stomped, shot as soon as they leave the front door! I truly feel bad for any black person who thinks otherwise because the ball can drop at any moment. Dozens tortured each day, and that’s not even considering what goes on when the bodycams get turned off! Yes, all lives matter. They do. But which lives are under attack every waking moment?

BECKY (empathetic enough not to want the BLACK ELDER to feel teamed up against, but still wanting to honor her conscience).—Antiracism is about accountability. If white people feel threatened, they need to do the work—unlearn their biases, reflect on their privilege, listen to black trauma.

BLACK ELDER.— This’s a motherfucking setup—straight up! People pushed too far push back. You’ve got black kids ungrateful for all they have. They can mouth off, act out, become social menaces and still get the job. You think white men—millions—are gonna sit there forever, muzzled, jobless, mocked as “white boys” while you tell them they’ve got all the power? They’re not imagining this shit—they’re living it. This’s a goddamn setup, bitch. You have no skin in the game. It won’t be you who pay the price. You can just hide behind your skin color and your MacBook when it blows up. Matter of fact, you may think you ain’t in the blast radius—but nah. Until my dying breath I’ll make it clear who pulled the strings: white dyke psyop cunts like you! You bet on motherfuckers being stupid. But you’ve made the wrong bet, cunts! We’re coming for your lies!

KAREN (to Becky).—We need to get out of here. No blood—.

BLACK ELDER.— You baiting me too, matter a fact. I could snap both of your necks right here. Keep walking—but look who’s on the hunt! Nah, I’m coming with you. Fuck the fucking car. How about I follow your asses home—maybe give you a taste of white supremacy! Because it won’t be my fault, right—if I dig it out just a little? You pushing me to go Eldrige Cleaver on that white pussy—for real. Bet even a dyke bitch like you would like it. Yeah, I can see it in your eyes. You juicing, bitch. You juicing!

BECKY (shaking, barely holding her sign).—Please—.

KAREN.—We’re done here. Walk, Becky.

BLACK ELDER (giddy, snapped).—Time’s up! Black people waking up. We all waking up . Keep walking because I’m gonna follow.

BECKY and KAREN (walking through the crowd, whispering to themselves).—. . . .

BLACK ELDER (singing out the lyrics to “Got My Mind Set on You” in the cadence of the George Harrison version, but here with a sinister edge).— “♪ I got my mind set on you. I got my mind set on you ♪.”

Becky and Karen do know, for all their focus on “the antiblackness problem,” to stay in their lane. As we just saw, they try to restrain themselves from teaching black people—a bad look, in their minds, because it embodies a power dynamic where whites stand in the position of superiority. Instead they focus on teaching fellow white people. Both of them, at different times, have been the ones on the bullhorn screaming out messages that their farmer’s-market brethren are meant to repeat, public scenes so captivating to behold you can almost here Werner Herzog narrating.

“I will work to repair the damage of my whiteness.”

“I will never deny the severity of antiblack racism.”

“I will never deny black truth.”

“I will support black businesses.”

“I will amplify black voices.”

“I will do everything in my power to abolish whiteness.”

“I will not weaponize the police against black people.”

“I will accept that payback often hurts.”

“I will redistribute my unearned advantages.”

“I will never call reparations ‘looting.’”

“I will never interfere with reparations.”

“I will try my best to help with reparations.”

“I will seek to understand more than to be understood."

“I will support restorative justice as a path forward."

It goes deeper. Becky and Karen know not to appropriate, having long ago pillow-suffocated the last wheezes of intellectual conscience. That conscience might have once whispered, loud enough to hear if they tried, 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 being a paradigm example. That conscience might have once whispered 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. That conscience might even have once whispered that the notion of cultural appropriation is 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). But now it has fallen silent, its face a placid repose now that the pillow has been lifted.

Becky and Karen know not to overreach. 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. And 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 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). But there is a deeper reason. Queer liberation goes hand in hand with black liberation because whiteness is the slave master pulling both chains. Whiteness, technically, is the common denominator behind all oppression (at least all oppression worthy of being worried about), which is why Becky and Karen 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: meant to show how whiteness, which equals heteronormativity just like God the Father equals the Holy Ghost according to trinitarian theology, deconstructs from the inside. But we are dealing with the same beast, whether we are talking about the sinister force that tosses iron-ballast-weighted black bodies overboard to the organ-rupturing depths of the ocean or the sinister force that denies lesbians the right to marry. Whiteness—its heterosexual norm (gay is deviant), its dualistic framework (white versus nonwhite, man versus woman)—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 own 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” (and often on the innocent-sounding pretense of just wanting to stop lice infestations), whiteness is not just what says black bodies should be tools of labor and entertainment. It is also what assumes the same creed that haunted every missionary's erection and every colonial governor’s 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, not even organic or fairtrade, due to cotton’s inextricable link to the blood-soaked whips of exploitation. 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. The star friend, understandably, used to be a fat black crippled dike. But she no longer comes around, which is a whole different story. Nature, however, abhors a vacuum. And now a new star, a trans star, has filled the void. She might be white but her value, especially with the eyebrow-arching uptick in transery still largely relegated to younger demographics, is not too far behind the one whose bulky orthopedic shoes she has filled.

The trans guest in question drops by on occasion for dinner get-togethers. These 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. It usually does not take much wine for the stranger to start bleeding her goth mascara onto the shoulders of her “new family,” her “new mothers” pepping her up by reminding her of the dubious tales of self-congratulation she herself has told them in the past (such as 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 either to scrub all non-positive representations of those who fall outside the norm or else (when the ink stain is too deep for erasure) to explain how whiteness is behind them in some shape or form: black cops beating black men is internalized whiteness; black people looting TVs is payback to the ravages of whiteness; or so forth.

Whoever their friends are and whatever labels they claim (nonbinary, genderfae, transmasc, demisexual), whether their shirts say “My Pronouns aren’t up for debate” or “¿Hómo Estás?” or “Decolonize, PERIODT” (yes, with the cringey “T”)—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—or, perhaps better, was being made to be outraged—by Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait), meant not merely that American kids would be eating Thunder Jet Fruit Snacks that featured the stealth bomber (the US’s heavily bragged about war weapon) but also that the 1992 film Aladdin would feature a light-skinned hero (modeled after Tom Cruise) who defeats all the swarthy-looking Persian enemies only then to croon Jasmine westward to “♪ A Whole New World ♪”—this, with little doubt, a euphemistic spin on impregnating some exotic pussy, both a fulfilling of and a reward for spreading American values (or in, more Chomskyan-Zinnian circles, spreading American hegemony): “♪ Don’t you dare close your eyes!” 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 here is how it goes—to give only two examples:

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 nothing more than a function of the white-male boot on their necks (as opposed to having to do with females tending to be much more person-centered than thing-centered).

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). The hand-painted welcome mat at the front door says “All Identities Valid Here”—a lovely message deconstructed by the much-louder-than-sotto-voce subtext: “except for cops, Catholics, Chads, and the list of toxicities goes on.” “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, an immigrant 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 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 corral the other kids: “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, Ms. 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. There are some mainstays. It cannot be helped. For example, Ms. Carter starts each class announcing her white privilege, which she always winds down with (1) an apology to how her privilege may have inadvertently inflicted trauma on black and brown people and (2) “a reminder to those in the room with privilege”: “Please friend, remember your privilege whenever we are taking turns.” And right afterwards, the routine no doubt welcomed, she always shifts to the same open question, the same rallying cry of static-identity liquefaction: “What does it feel like to be YOU, today?” But aside from this, 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) have 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.

One might assume Becky would not get ahead of herself like this—that she would take a wait and watch approach; that she would make sure Arlo was sure before reshaping the household and ordering the books and imagining the life to come. After all, Becky has trust issues. They are subtle but traceable. She never picks up her perfume bottle by the cap, for instance. The magnetic seal is stronger than gravity, and she knows it. Yet just the thought of picking it up by the cap spikes her blood with cortisol. What explains, then, her headlong dive?

Excitement plays a role. But it is not that the excitement about the good news outweighs the doubt about whether the good news is true. The doubt is not outweighed. It is just that Becky’s psychology is more control-oriented. Instead of refusing to take action until she can be more sure of the other person’s commitment, she is one to take the proactive steps toward grooming the other person’s commitment. It is the difference between the person who, because of his doubts, delays proposing until he has gotten repeated confirmation that his partner would say “yes” and the person who, because of the same doubts, buys an expensive engagement ring in hopes that the significant financial investment and the jumbotron public gesture will compel the other person to say “yes.” Here we have two coping mechanisms for the same mistrust: hanging back until the reality seems certain or laying on the pressure to make the reality certain. The books and planning, then, are expressions not of her trust for the future but of her efforts to script the future in light of her mistrust.

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.

The Child Formerly Known As (a name that shall not be spoken), now experimenting with she/her pronouns in the climate-controlled terrarium of home, banishes Voldemort to the basement and soon emerges as “Lila.” “Lila” was not the preferred vibe either mother had been vision-boarding. They had hoped for something more radiant with justice-oriented meaning, something that might signal their daughter’s life-locked commitment to dismantling whiteness and making amends to the historically downtrodden—like, for example, the perhaps-too-Hebrew-sounding “Reparah” (a name, rich with gravity, invoking the long-overdue forty acres and a mule, which today would be at the trillion-dollar scale when we factor in inflation and the interest accrued from all the domestic terror and obesity-provoking stress in the years after liberation). Nothing if not champions of child autonomy, though, Becky and Karen let “Lila” stand—albeit not without throwing out a few or ten alternatives, each delivered with the flat-tone of theatrical neutrality.

Becky and Karen inform the school. With enough bureaucratic speed to make any follow-the-money type suspect that some mega government grant was at stake, within the hour the system adjusts—same over-it secretary (grumbling over her coffee dregs “damn white chil’rin”), same just-another-Tuesday drill: new name, new pronouns (file flipped). Ms. Carter is, of course, over the moon—although a bit miffed, bruised, at not being the one to whom Lila revealed her truest truth. Becky would have completely understood that feeling, that sour pang of jealousy, had the roles been reversed—one of the many subterranean symmetries between them, never acknowledged but always humming (like old powerlines in the wall).

Although it does not offset the deficit of being white (a hole no amount of pronouns or chosen identifiers can fill), Lila rides the unmistakable uptick in self-worth and the heady sugar-rush of attention. Her teachers fawn, offering up solemn words like “courage” and “authenticity” as though she had yanked Excalibur from bedrock. Her parents beam, as if cleansed of some inherited shame. Their first pro-trans event after the decision, a rally bustling with an energy encapsulated in the several signs that yelled in red “Decapitate TERFs,” was like a religious experience. When the celebrity mother of a trans child spoke through the bullhorn they felt more belonging than perhaps they ever did. It was more potent than a Xanax chased by gin.

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—I am here today as the mother of a proud trans man. I am here today as the aunt of a proud trans man. My best friend's kid is trans, and my kid's best friend is trans. We can no longer deny the reality. It took a long time for us to stop denying the reality of gayness. Now it’s time we let everyone out of the closet.

BECKY (to KAREN).—Oh my God. I love her!

KAREN (misty-eyed). —She gets it. She actually gets it.

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—Look behind you. That building means something. That’s where my son had his top surgery. His doctors were fantastic, the best we could have imagined. They treated him with dignity. His surgeon didn’t just change a body. No, he helped change a future. But now that same hospital turns families away. That same hospital that once helped has decided to cancel gender-affirming care for trans youth. It sickens me. This city, like every single city around the world, is filled with young people who thought they had a place to go—a place where they could receive the highest care. That place has now been shut to them. It sickens me to my core.

BECKY and KAREN.—Boooo! Booooo!

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—I have seen up close what gender-affirming care means—not just for the person receiving it, but for everyone who loves them. It’s lifesaving. It’s essential. It’s protection. It’s breath. It’s a damn basic human right!

BECKY and KAREN (clapping).—

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—This hospital was one of the few places we had to turn. And now, in this city that prides itself on being ahead of the curve, they’re closing the door.

BECKY and KAREN.—Boooo! Booooo!

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—My family was lucky. We were barely in time. And I lie awake wondering who won’t be. Who’s being told, right now, “wait,” “not yet,” or worse, “go somewhere else.” But where? The list is shrinking. The clock is ticking. Almost every child I know is trans. The impact here is more devastating than many know.

BECKY and KAREN.—Boooo! Booooo!

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—But we will not give in. We will not allow this. We will not step aside while fear decides who gets to live freely.

BECKY and KAREN.—Yeah!

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—This is not going away. We are not going away. Disrupt the traffic. Block the doors. If they block the doors to us, we will block the doors to them.

KAREN (provoking chuckles in nearby attended).—Fuck the white fascists!

CELEBRITY SPEAKER.—Do what is right. Do what is ethical. Do what is human. Children are the most vulnerable. Their lives can’t afford to be tied up in red tape. Trans rights are human rights. Trans lives matter. And we will fight for them with everything we’ve got. If you're here today, come back tomorrow—and the next day. Come not just when it’s trending. Come when it’s quiet—when it’s hard, when it’s cold. This movement cannot run on applause. It runs on presence. So show up. Show up again and again and again. Thank you.

BECKY and KAREN (arguably starting up the chant, an extra cherry on top of their glowing pride).—Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter!

But just as with those Insta-couple selfies (sun-kissed cocktails, eyes free of crease and bag), the bulk of the iceberg still lurks beneath the frame: dark, massive, unmapped. Deep down Lila feels—not wrong exactly, more like unmoored. She misses her action figures, the ones she used to insist were “men” when her mothers cooed “dolls.” She thinks of them now, gathering dust in the basement, surrender to the cobwebs and the faint metallic tang of rust-sealed paint cans never white (not even the primer). Her fingers remember them: the plastic ripple of abs, the stiff matte capes. Just the thought of them loosens tears some nights. And yet it is not as if anything, anything tangible, is stopping her from going down and visiting, even from bringing one back up and tucking it under her pillow (just for a night). But she never does.

Lila is not sure if the tears mean she no longer wants to be a girl or if they mean she is not sure. She is not sure, to make matters worse, if being unsure is already its own kind of certainty. Social creatures turn outward in times of confusion. But when she tries—tentatively, hypothetically (almost like she is saying it for someone else)—to test the waters (“Maybe I’m still a boy"), Becky’s face flinches—a flicker of ice few but the most intuitive could feel, especially under the warm blanket of lavender affirmation. “It’s okay to feel unsure. Lila, my precious girl, you don’t need to decide right now." And yet the subtext—if it still qualifies as subtext—is clear, is it not? Staying “Lila" feels like the path of minimal resistance and maximal applause.

What is most telling—what might worry the sober-minded, perhaps were they not browbeaten by the zeitgeist into silence—is that Lila’s confusion is no fluke. She is exceptional only in the sheer depth of her saturation, how fully and how early she has been steeped in the Kool-Aid. For most children, far less exposure suffices to catch the bug. Transness being that fashionable watermark of easy-won clout (perfect for well-to-do westerners as lazy, and so as easily snagged by abs-in-two-weeks gimmicks, as they are desperate to block out the glowing black peeling open by growing boredom), the molasses-glow of specialness now surrounding trans identity exerts its Wormtongue pull even in the absence of pom-poming parents and slogan-slinging teachers. And that alone goes a long way toward explaining the cluster-bomb phenomenon that Abigail Shrier has been warning about for over a decade: entire friend groups, before they even start to reek of stale vapes, declaring themselves trans in lockstep with the viral drumbeats of TikTok and Tumblr.

Gild the runway with too much glitter and you are begging, of course, for the classic teenage snap-back. You court adolescent backlash, to be more specific, when—in addition to the validation bubble of glittering TikTok feeds and now more and more states forcing parents to choose between male or female or nonbinary on the birth certificate (“undecided” still off the table for a newborn)—you sweeten the deal with the sugary coos of teachers and parents who warmly embrace that very fashion. Massachusetts has yet to go the way of New Jersey, where certain hospitals have new parents—scared out of their wits, holding swaddled potatoes still glistening with birth-cream—fill out a questionnaire not only about their newborn’s gender identity (male, female, trans-male, trans-female, genderqueer, and so on) but also about their newborn’s sexual orientation (lesbian or gay, straight or heterosexual, bisexual, asexual, and so on). Nor has Massachusetts yet reached the fever pitch of Oregon, where every boy bathroom in every school must include tampons and maxi-pads to validate the full blossom of inclusive plumbing. But just given the glut of such “affirming” teachers and parents (especially where the Thompsons live, a city that pitches itself—like the whole of California—as a sanctuary for minors seeking gender-affirming healthcare), it is hardly a shock that we now see at the middle-school level—as Discord DMs, For You pages, and gaming-mic mutterings make perfectly clear—a backlash beginning to froth: crude, cocky, pimply, and destined (typical pendulum politics), to overcorrect into its own flavor of ugly. More than just trolling whispers over lunch trays and in Fortnite lobbies (more like the blowing wide open the electric fence around what cannot be said, Hitler himself often invoked as a patron saint of the mission), the backlash flirts with its own flavor of keep-the-pendulum-swinging bigotry—a fact that is unfortunate but understandable since kids will be kids, especially in a country whose ethos is marked by the push-pull melodrama of an 80s-style switchblade gang fight (the eternal archetype being Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video). Just consider, for instance, how many adolescents might have disowned the flower-child ethos had their parents—marching bare bush in tie-dye bandanas—strummed protest anthems all over town on out-of-tune ukuleles or had their classroom teachers—reeking of patchouli and weed—facilitated tits-out cuddle circles and let kids—so long as they ask first—choose their own grades as freely as they might twist her pink bubblegum nipples to “explore a mother goddess.” That is the thing about revolutions led from above: eventually, hence perhaps the Reaganism of Alex Keaton on Family Ties, the kids chuck stones just to feel gravity again.

But with Lila we are talking an age before tween rebellion, before that cusp where eye-rolls curdle love into irony. Lila still lives in the shadow of Olympus, her parents still close enough to sun-summoners and moon-tuckers—deities whose favor still feels existential, whose approval still dictates the very pirouette of the globe, even as their halos have noticeably begun to crack into mortal rust. It would be odd, the exception, for a child at such an age not to love Raekwon if Only Built 4 Cuban Linx soundtracked every school drop-off and Saturday farmers market. And Lila, we know, is not just any child. Her sweetness, her gentle porosity, her inborn sensitivity—these incline her, far more than peers at the crest of the bell curve, toward the light of maternal validation. How could someone like Lila, photosynthesizing that light (rather than merely basking in it), not find herself oriented reflexively toward the North Star of parental approval?

Especially when we factor in that the approval feels elusive, Lila orients toward her mothers with the tenacity of a compass needle beside a magnet, a magnet—reducing the tug of those on the fridge to dowsing-rod quackery—so strong it poses the neodymium threat of damaging the compass itself (perhaps even shattering it to PTSD: Pieces Too Smashed to Describe). How can that approval not seem, for all the loving efforts of Becky and Karen, more like a flickering flashlight in a downpour than a floodlight over a night swim, more like a rumor than a beacon? Think about how much time Becky and Karen pour into pathologizing and flaying whiteness, fighting it—that shadow-cause behind every hurt—like Jedi sworn to purge the galaxy’s rot. It seeps through the house sharp with coffee breath, wine breath, the dank tang of a righteous armpit-vulva duo—a steady hiss snaking through bedroom vents.

“The stranglehold of white male ideology is brutal, careless. Just look at that orange asshole wrecking health care—prices up, care down.”

“Whites destroy everything. It’s always the same attitude: ‘I got mine, screw the rest.’”

“It’s not good, no. But can you blame him for stabbing that white kid? There’s a history, a long long history, of whites telling blacks ‘You’re in the wrong seat. Get to the back of the bus.’ It’s deep in that beautiful black boy’s bones—the trauma. It was bound to lash out! Rosa-Parks days are over. That white kid might as well’ve called him the n-word! The beautiful black boy was released on bond, by some goddamn luck—a glitch in the system. But the steady flood of harm continues to flow regardless. Just look at what the white kid’s father did. He had the audacity to show up at the press conference organized by that beautiful black family, knowing damn well (he can talk about coming to pray all he wants), knowing damn well how offensive that would be; knowing the anxiety his presence would cause; knowing that the media would turn its cameras his way, once again centering whiteness.”

“White culture’s so goddamn closed, so suffocating. No one else gets to breathe except inside the tightest rules about what’s good, what’s normal. And then what do we do? I mean it really makes me ashamed. We make up stories about beautiful black and brown people, stories with no basis in truth! Sometimes I wonder how I even look at myself.”

The time alone, as any child of a workaholic well knows, would already present a hurdle to deeper connection—one of those quiet hurdles that, although seemingly no biggie from the bleachers, bruises the shins raw with tap-tap repetition. But the hurdle towers even higher, the height of a track-and-field star’s surrealist nightmare, when we factor in the mirror. Set aside the more nuanced psyche-mines primed to detonate later: like when she finds herself, a few years down the line, watching her figure even though she knows—as the often-quoted and sticky-tabbed book, Fearing the Black Body, right there on the family shelf makes emphatically clear—to pursue thinness is to be complicit in white supremacy, the ideal of thinness having long served to demonize nonwhite bodies for their Hottentot asses. Lila must stare down her own white face (pale and unchosen) before shuffling to the morning fridge for string cheese or apple juice, only then to face the paper hung by magnet: a Sharpie-written crib of DiAngelo—one where, in line with every major manual of style, the “B” in every “black” must shout with full capitalization whereas the “W” in every “white” must flinch in lowercase (itself a concession from radical circles who demanded as well at least a one-point decrease from the font size of the rest of the text).

HOW TO BE LESS white

Be less oppressive

Be less arrogant / ignorant

Trust Black voices: they lead the way

Stand down when a Black person speaks

Remember: white logic does not override Black feelings

Even when the words smear in her peripheral vision, even when she is not looking straight at them, they burn into her breakfast with the quiet subliminality of a TV-sitcom jingle that refuses to sleep. She chews in silence while the list floats just behind her eyelids—not fully decoded, but registered in the bones like static before a lightning bolt splits the sky.

The tidal forces tugging Lila transward, far from inciting rebellion, warp and flex her like Io under Jupiter’s gravitational insistence. Let us be fair, however. It would be too easy to say that the torquing upon flesh and spirit is dictated neither by who Lila is nor by her choices but rather by the binary stars she orbits. For different kids in the same orbit might not have wobbled into a mishappen hunk of spinning clay. And even in the extreme case of a child who had been broken in night after girthy night by her father’s halitotic rutting, it becomes hard to say where corruption ends and complicity begins; it becomes hard to say, more specifically, it is not her choice when, having caught the bug, she starts grinding back like a firecracker in sync with his every thrust or when, throughout her adulthood, she forever goes for similarly bearded bikers with similar predilections for backdoor dumps under a stranglehold grip. That is the horror of corruption: the victim’s inner furnace of depravity roars to a sun’s self-sustaining fury, such that guess who soon enough becomes the one demanding, for a five-across-the-eyes taste of the old, that not one of her free holes in the heat of action ever go without a daddy’s-little-pig beer bottle. As any sober mind would agree, however, we must not let fairness excuse omission; we must not let the nuances of truth obscure the bigger truth. Just as it would be wrong to let Big Vape completely off the hook for the teenage lung-collapse epidemic, it would be wrong as well to let Lila’s external environment (Becky and Karen, the school, the rainbow-glossed arms of Disney) completely off the hook for pulling her trans.

The ravaging pull on Lila, after all, is as true as true can be. And its irresistibility becomes all the clearer when we consider the kids who do rebel in like environments. Digging their heels in, 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 kaleidoscope carousel of gender play, their dissent often dives deeper into the prevailing tide. Rebellion, in a context where nonconformity is the reigning fashion, often means one-upping—out-nonconforming—the rest, 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 that make transgenderism seem tame: identifying as neopronouned foxes and cats, as transmasc woodland sprites, as plush-suited therians trotting down school hallways on all fours (their leashes hooked to BDSM-studded choker chains)—the whole kit and caboodle, the whole howling circus of deerboys and cryptid-gendered techwitches, 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. No one calls her “weird." The air of correctness recirculated through every duct, so scrubbed of tension it seems as synthetic as the lips and music and perfumes of a TikTok generation, hums with cloying warmth and trigger-proof piety—no sidelong glances or mean-spirited snickers, not even the neutral chill of peers tongue-tied by her difference. Yes, the safe-space ideology that swaddles every nook and screen of her life, for all its talk of inclusion and diversity, is as bigoted as bigoted can be: spitting venom as it smile at any crack in the mold; branding any deviation in the homogeny as “unsafe” or “triggering” or “problematic” or “in need of accountability” and thereby to be “canceled.” The thing is, Lila—like the daughter of a plantation master in the time of chattel slavery—is on the sunny side of the pitchfork bigotry. She is embraced, even in spite of her whiteness, proactively and deeply by everyone around her—no, not cradled as tightly as she would be if she were also black, but still enough to be at least a silver mascot for all the cult stands for. Lila, in short, is lucky—well, lucky according to at least one way of looking at (because one could always argue, rightly, that such kid-glove pampering of safe-space coo leads to feet too soft to bear even sand).

None of this good luck lulls her parents, especially Becky, into putting down their guard. Becky—ear cocked to the reports of transphobia running rampant in other schools around the nation—does not comport herself in alignment with just how cushy Lila’s position is. Like a 1950s housewife hoarding cans of Spam (scarred by the ghost of Depression-era wish sandwiches), Becky speaks to Lila as if hate’s claws are circling close. “Most kids won’t get it, my sweet girl,” she whispers, tucking Lila’s hair behind her ear like a prayer. “But you’re helping teach them. You’re making them better.” Her eyes glow with pride. But the warmth feels less like a hug and more like a sash of obligation draped across Lila like a JonBenét beauty queen.

Lila feels trapped. She feels trapped not in the operatic way of a prisoner rattling dungeon bars but in a much more muted way, foggier. One could say she is like a commuter with no idea how he got on the train or where he is going, and yet too groggy to get off. That hits the target, but not quite the bullseye. Lila is perhaps more like a cat who, stuck indoors (unable to exercise their mini-lion itch to stalk and torture and kill), is depressed by their routine—a routine they so fiercely cherish that, in a surprising burst out of their listless slump, they would bite and scratch any hand nudging them outside a wide-open door to sparrow-trilling freedom. Lila, in other words, finds herself on the first steps down a path that leads so many routine-sick people to a point of no longer even being able to imagine ending their routine. She does not want to disappoint her parents. She does not want to fudge her part in the war against the white supremacist patriarchy. But the skirts are beginning to chafe. Even the new name, her own choice, has started to curdle, its once-bright tang now a stale whiff of buyer’s remorse.

These are not Lila’s articulated thoughts. None of it can yet snap into tidy sentences. She lacks the words, the vantage (maybe even the license). Yet there is a soft ache for something lost, a phantom-limb gnawing for something slipped away. Perhaps, then, we should return to saying “he.” Feeling trapped, after all, need not be verbal to be real. Language should not, in blunter words, lag behind reality. He craves the quiet intactness of that simpler self called “Arlo,” a name soft as a teddy bear carrying aromas of a life less knotted. Perhaps that name deserves to return too. Some might chalk it up to nostalgia’s rose-tinted squint, to a backward-looking temperament that tends to see the way things were more fondly than the way they are. Some might even pin it on internalized transphobia, a rearing of the head of whiteness from within. Whatever the root, the longing is no mirage. The problem is, what child would be bold enough to pipe up at risk of fracturing—so at least it feels from inside a child’s mind—the golden beam of parental love?

By age eight, Arlo is showing signs of anxiety—not fraying at the seams or anything, but definitely knotted up in ways that do not quite come undone. He has pulled back from friends, spending long hours cross-legged on the carpet sketching chimeric creatures: mismatched limbs, hybrid eyes. Sleep has become patchy, splintered by sweaty bouts of wakefulness he cannot name. But he is not alone in this drift. He has a therapist. And although the therapist is a white male, he is one of the good ones—certified safe, a green-lit ally. Dr. Aliano, a professional peer of Karen’s, came recommended not only for his credentials but for what Karen, after briefing him on Arlo, believed could be a real contribution to the cause. But the difference maker was that Becky did her homework, scoured his record, and liked what she found. Not only does he specialize in gender identity, but his track record glows like a pride float at dusk. He has helped children with unsupportive parents escape to their “glitter families.” He has helped teens find their footing in the no-man’s land of doubt through hormone shots parting the fog like a blade. “Gender-affirming hormones,” Dr. Aliano says in one of the video interviews Becky combed before the first session (voice smooth as antiseptic and warm as patchouli smoke), “show a remarkable ability to silence the voices of internalized transphobia (the voices that whisper, ‘Just quit already’)”—a statement that makes excellent sense, for whatever it might be worth to say: imagine someone stricken by doubts about whether transitioning to male is the right choice (wobbling on the male-trans edge) and then imagine how that person must feel after that fatigue-reducing and well-being-enhancing and motivation-increasing and concentration-improving shot testosterone!

No degrees on his walls, no embossed seals or oak-framed diplomas to reinforce the creaky scaffolding of hierarchy and meritocracy—the fact that Dr. Aliano opened the first session with a tear-salted mea culpa for his many privileges, apologizing even for any whitespeak or mansplaining he might inadvertently tumble into, rendered Becky’s up-all-night research sessions superfluous as far as she was concerned. What did it was the way he apologized: no corporate polish or self-congratulatory theater, only a genuine sniffle and a trembling hand reaching for eco-bleached tissue after eco-bleached tissue. His voice low and empathetically modulated (an NPR voice of lavender handshakes), his tears nonstop—something even buzzed inside of Becky (a low electric hum, a primal flutter, somewhere near the perineum), an ozonic crackle of distant attraction—a spark that Karen seemed to clock, her eyes ping-ponging back and forth between the two of them with tight-lipped jealousy (and even, dare we say, a blink-and-miss smidge of whiteness in its truest form: territoriality).

One could almost imagine—if not in this universe, then in some nearby parallel—the bedspring squeaks and headboard thuds rippling through some hourly-rate motel off the interstate: frayed curtains half-drawn, bedside Giddeon still factory-crisp, the sour tang of illicit musk. Perhaps, only perhaps, Karen is there too, her mouth (locked on like a carwash vacuum hose) lending clitoral suction right above a veiny piston too close for comfort—ultimately (for the team, for the marriage) even taking the pullout load to the face in wincing disgust, sticking out some reluctant tongue and even opening wider on command (“Good girl”). The hardcore fantasy becomes too vivid to ignore when we factor in a few extra details.

First, consider Becky’s rabid addiction to The Gut Puncher™, that goliath dildo stashed under the bed—its silhouette mistakable in the shadows for a toppled lawn gnome (straight insanity given her bird-boned petiteness but undeniable to anyone who has gotten even a bikini-blurred glimpse of her drag-tuckable lips, cipher of her obsession: a snail-footed vulva that could do shadow puppets on the wall; a rippled deli-meat number that would have Georgia O'Queef do a doubletake, rubbernecking—no, rubbernosing—like a botanist before a jungle flower never before catalogued).

Second, consider the sea change in the LGBTQ community: the mantra of the day—touted across podcast panels and PTA wine circles, even insinuated in every Pixar release—is that “everyone is on the spectrum” (meaning that the burliest lumberjack nurses a kernel of gayness, even if it is as latent as deer musk under flannel), and this mantra has begun to eclipse the old-guard’s insistence (an insistence once deployed to ward off the hawks of conversion therapy and pray-away-the gay) that some gay people are just plain gay—born that way, rather than secretly harboring a straight person inside that can be unlocked by a smooth-talking Sean Connery in the right lighting: “♪ Baby it’s cold outside ♪.”

The fantasy only gets more graphic, troubling even (troubling beyond just prolapsing canals), when we factor in the counterfactual. Had Becky known—well, had we known that she had known—the following facts about Dr. Aliano, an aphrodisiacal cache of woke bona fides potent enough to churn her butter to a horse froth, only the most vanilla among us would have failed to picture the cinematic collapse of a domesticity that everyone thought would last forever: Becky swollen-ankled in her third trimester with a child conceived in affirmations and lavender oil; Karen, former arch-lobber of the “toxic” grenade, served a restraining order because of her “toxicity”; custody battle for Arlo—the whole works.

Dr. Aliano is fluent in right speak: using “chest feeding” for “breast feeding” (to avoid dysphoric exclusion) and even “safecasts” for “trigger warnings” (to avoid calling to mind the violence of guns).

Dr. Aliano has flagged jazz hands, while more evolved than “the patriarchal bullhorn of clapping,” as “an ableist flex against persons without hands.”

Dr. Aliano coined “Pre-TSD,” a term meant to carve out some linguistic elbow room so that maybe one day we can appreciate a type of trauma that disproportionately affects BIPOC and LGBTQ peoples: the trauma felt in anticipation of harassing possibilities (like the high likelihood of having a white teacher next semester, or going to a nightclub where the DJ might spin a problematic artist).

Dr. Aliano once encouraged a law student (a patient he did not sleep with despite her pulling a Sharon Stone leg switch in his office) to report her professor for being inconsistently selective in her protections of vulnerable populations: the professor, so the story goes, had cut discussion of rape law as a courtesy to those sensitive to rape and yet, as Dr. Aliano likes to paraphrase the patient’s words at dinner parities and the like, “had the audacity to go on to discuss food law even when there are students in the room who know people, loved ones even, who have developed cancers from certain additives.”

Dr. Aliano has gone on record denouncing, as “white logic in cardigan guise,” CBT’s four most “colonial and outdated” assumptions: that resilience is worth cultivating, that patients can become more resilient through exposure, that exposure builds up a “psychological immune system,” and that people should make peace with the past and learn not to take things so personally: “yeah, try telling that to black people,” he says—“how convenient for white people to say!”

Dr. Aliano has argued, both at conferences and in print, that trigger warnings themselves could be brutalizing to vulnerable populations: a professor warning that there will be rape in the textbook, for example, “creates,” as Dr. Aliano puts it, “a sense of ominous foreboding and invites especially the black and brown students, students who suffer from greater rates of SA, to project darker—more penetrative—scenarios onto what the warning is warning about.”

Dr. Aliano refuses, and his voicemail message leaves no room for ambiguity, to accept any cis white patients, the idea being that they have enough privilege to get help whenever they need it: “my practice focuses on the really harmed—not the really fine.”

On Arlo’s bedroom wall hangs the laminated list of “Queer Affirmations,” courtesy of Dr. Aliano—a standard-issue handout for every patient in his care. Its edges curl slightly from the humid breath of a plugged-in diffuser, the bombastic phrases bolded in Comic Sans like Mussolini war cries for a bubble-wrapped revolution.

I stand up for myself and have a right to be recognized

Worthy, I am entitled to shout down what is alien to me

Worthy, I do not need permission to feel safe

I am not a cry bully

Truth should never interfere with justice!

Free range in speech means free range in trauma

I do not have to “go with the flow”

I am enough: I do not deserve to be criticized or challenged

I will not let intent untrigger me!

Hate speech is real violence

I am depressed because I have been and continue to be abused

Jokes do not help handle trauma: trauma is no joking matter

No context in which a harm is spoken ever excuses the speaker

I deserve to feel good, even while learning

I love myself too much to accept being challenged

I am worth not being abused in the name of free speech

I am worth not being abused in the name of comedy

I am worth not being abused in the name of education

I am worth not being abused in the name of American ideals

I will not tolerate exposure to the hurt of so-called “great art”

I decide what I learn and I deserve to be safe at all times

I am arbiter of what is offensive

Suffering kills blessings; it does not teach us to count them

No one else but me gets to decide what truly harms me

The victim’s perspective is the only perspective

Intentions never matter when it comes to being offended

The answer to bad speech is not better speech

The list, for all its bluster, has not worked to quell Arlo’s anxiety and confusion. In fairness to Dr. Aliano, Arlo does not chant these each morning and night like Hail Marys for the terminally triggered. Maybe if he did, there would be more improvement. But the problem is that the therapy sessions do not seem to be doing much good either: the drawing marathons grow longer, the sleep frays thinner. “I’ve seen it before,” Dr. Aliano says during a closed-door session with a worried Becky and Karen, lowering his voice into a tone one might use to break the news of a tumor and yet with the confidence of a psychologist who has yet to see Reagan MacNeil’s head spin a full three-sixty. “What it really boils down to—what I suspect you’ve already guessed—is internalized transphobia.” He points to the bookcase behind him when he says this. Becky and Karen do not know why, but he does because he has in mind a 2020 study in The Lancet that claims that societal stigma manifests as self-doubt or shame in many trans individuals.

It feels oddly poetic, or at least symbolically overripe, that Namaste—the practice where Dr. Aliano dishes out his trauma-informed care—operates out of a repurposed Pizza Hut. The building, now blue and gold with Tibetan prayer flags fluttering above the entrance (sometimes even with the snap of Himalayan basecamp), still retains its unmistakable red mansard roof in the Dutch-gable style: kitsch past rebranded as sanctuary. Something in the brain resists the makeover. “Once a Pizza Hut, always a Pizza Hut”—an intrusive line that, strangely enough, feels relevant to the conversation at hand. Dr. Aliano, his head right where one of those stained-glass lamps used to dangle in allusion to Tuscany, encourages Becky and Karen to continue affirming “Lila." “Hold fast to Lila. This is time of uncertainty,” he says. His eyes are gentle but intent. “Think of all the pressures pulling Lila backward—back to he, back to the name we won’t say—back to that false shell. If only as a matter of protest, as an act of social counterpoint, it’s crucial for you two to be the difference: the ballast, the resistance.” Dr. Aliano lets the silence swell, a sacred pause before the benediction. “I’ve seen too many families walk away. You two have been amazing. You need to keep on being amazing.” He does not say it, but in his mind he is thinking that soon enough he will have the assistance of hormones. “We just have to be patient. Stay the course.”

Dr. Aliano, it should be noted, is no mere therapist. A grandmaster of ideological aikido, he flips seemingly disqualifying data—statistics that might puncture his creed—into molten fuel for its blaze; he transmute facts that should splinter his gospel into radiant pillars of its truth. Becky and Karen, their minds a dojo where truth twists to serve the cause, have black belts in this style as well, of course. Although they often default to justifying white-male disadvantages (“It’s the least owed to the fucks!”), sometimes—even if at risk of contradicting that more typical angle—they reframe the disadvantages as evidence of white privilege itself:

citing the basically nonexistent national discussion of unarmed white males maimed and shot by police (a raw number dwarfing black victims, despite blacks being higher perpetrators of violent crime) not as proof of white marginalization or erasure but as a jaw-dropping testament to how thoroughly whiteness protects its own from traumatic imagery (“Just think of how many times they show beautiful black men choked, beaten, and shot whereas they almost never—I mean, talk about ultimate luxury—they almost never release the bodycam when it's a white guy”);

citing the demonizing stereotypes of “the mayonnaise rage machine” and the collective ridicule at the white dick energy of “future school shooters” (all strange when blacks are the bigger perpetrators of school shooting and violent crime) not as the most egregious of social bullying (extremely egregious when compared to how you lose your job if you call a fag a “fag” or even fail to capitalize, like every AI chatbot—in perfect evidence of ideological creep—is programed to do, the b in “black”) but as a sign of the extreme tensile strength of white power (“Any other group would crumble under that level of hostility but the white-scum machine absorbs the demonization and even uses it to siphon pity, like a self-repairing machine”);

citing the epidemic of white-male suicides (rates climbing well past other groups) as no cry for aid but a perverse badge of privilege’s weight, since only the cushioned can afford to crumble at their own hands (“Whiteness gives them the rope, the room to unravel without consequence”);

citing the underrepresentation of white males in elite colleges, medical schools, and media not as exclusion but as proof of white-male supremacy being so deep it needs no chair at the table, as proof of a privilege so intense that white males do not need representation to belong or even good jobs to keep winning (“Whiteness is so embedded that it can weather any storm”).

If you think Becky and Karen demonstrate black-belt deftness when it comes to aikido inversion, Dr. Aliano is a tenth-dan. One gem will suffice. All adults know how almost all of their tomboy friends in the 70s and 80s (wild sprites scaling oaks and playing sandlot hardball, scab-kneed rebels with long hair hidden under threadbare caps) later donned wedding veils, cradled Irish twins, and twirled in floral aprons—peony femininity blooming lush as a summer vine. What does Dr. Aliano have to say on the matter? He does not dodge it. Seated across from Becky and Karen, he brings it up himself. He speaks on it, running on a senior-moment of autopiloted due diligence, as if Becky and Karen were not the best parent team he has ever met; as if he senses, despite their going above and beyond the call of cooperation, doubts that might either be fueled by or call to mind this fact. His words might be script, but it is hard to say his tears are. He sees this tomboy fact, so he explain in between bouts of getting chocked up, as illustrating just how rampant and effective internalized transphobia is. “Those tomboys,” he mourns, “were coerced into closets, their lives now a muted wail of buried selves. It’s a tragedy,” he chokes. His voice quivers like a struck bell. “It’s theft. We must save the children. Otherwise the norms will continue to chain them to torment.” He leans toward Becky and Karen, gaze alight with zeal. “I mean, let’s look at the facts. I mean, really. Lila hangs out mainly with girls, right? Doesn’t that say a whole bunch? It’s not a hundred percent, sure. But its enough to make a solid bet as to what gender we’re working with. And then add to that all the rest we know.” His words rise, a captain’s bellow slicing the fog. “Stay . . . the . . . course!”

Tucked in a composition book kept under his bed with the dust bunnies and other relics of before, Arlo’s drawings begin to tell what might seem—outside of rainbow aikido at least—a conflicting story. The medieval bestiary—once a riot of wyverns, harpies, and horned hydras stitched from childhood’s fevered logic—careens into something far more haunting. A new image emerges, one that repeats with unnerving persistence: a small boy curled in a bird cage, his knees tucked and shoulders slumped, ringed by grown-ups whose grins gleam past him, bright as oblivious stars. Whether Arlo understands what he is drawing, that matters little. Artists rarely pause to question, while in the grip of the muse, the why or even the what of the outpouring. But by the palette alone the outsider’s snap judgment would likely hit bullseye. For the cage, you cannot make this up, is always Pepto-Bismol pink: soft, lush, impenetrable—never silver or black; never the muted graphite of Crayola’s standard issue for such dungeon motifs.

Becky and Karen—seeing no blacksmith hammer in their hands, hearing no master keys jangling at their hips—respond less with reflection than with reinforcement. This, of course, is entirely in character. Unlike the thumb-twiddling truth-chaser who circles every angle before making a move (even at the cost of indecision in the face of injustice), Becky and Karen paint in black-and-white strokes—the broad get-it-done brushwork of activism. So they double down on affirmation, on validation. They march Arlo right to a trans-youth group, clutching his hand like a banner. They nod solemnly through tear-streaked testimonials and beam at the most exotic pronoun badges, proud of themselves for exposing Arlo to such diversity: all walks of child, trumpet their genders and lived truths with the unified devotion of the Children of the Corn—more a metaphorical monotone than a literal one, but definitely with the same unsettling serenity. Arlo perches on a cold folding chair, sketching quietly on a napkin. He feels unprepared, a beauty pageant contestant who did not practice his dance number. The children all seem like adults and he feels out of place, an imposter in a choreographed chorus of certainty. He does not know how to name the feeling. He only knows, in the soft part of his stomach that teachers point to metaphorically when explaining good touches versus bad touches (that low coil of instinct part that aches when something is not quite right)—he only knows he does not belong.

Becky, perhaps sensing this hesitation, becomes more anxious about discussing puberty blockers with a doctor. Karen, the comparative—merely comparative—heel-dragger of the two, offers no resistance. Dr. Aliano, even better, gives his multicultural blessing, slipping Becky a post-it note with scribbled contact info for a pediatric endocrinologist. “You’ll be in good hands,” he says with a look as reassuring as his vetiver aroma. “Dr. Helen doesn’t just consider the pituitary gland, the pancreas, and whatnot. She considers the culture,” he says with the trust-me-finality of a car salesman into whose arms you almost want to collapse (giving the man your burdens). “Lila’s a bit too young. But it’s about making the contact early! And Dr. Helen isn’t afraid to advocate. She puts her license on the line to make sure children start on the right path as soon as possible. Believe me, there’s no place else you’re going to get it sooner. Another chapter is about to open in this young girl’s life.”

Becky believes, as she tells Karen in the dark hush of a sleepless bedroom after a meeting with Dr. Helen, that this might be the only step to protect Lila’s future. “It’s now or never. It kills me to think that—. I mean, imagine if Lila were born ten or twenty years ago,” she says (regurgitating Dr. Helen’s own lines back at Karen). She would’ve had to go through puberty, male puberty. That terrifies me. I don’t think she would have survived it.” “I get that,” Karen says. Becky continues, mainly speaking to herself. “Dr. Helen seems like a good person. She laid it all out, how it would go. She said many doctors wait until sixteen to administering estrogen, but that we can start up to two years earlier if we have the track record of early blockers. Early blockers move the schedule all up, all forward.” Karen nods in response. “It’s just an implant in the arm. That’s what you said, right—the blockers?” “Yes,” Becky says. “It’s now or never.”

The phrase “It’s now or never” echoes throughout the room in the literal silence. Becky thinks vaguely, but quite tellingly, of how the window of imagination and creativity cinches shut so considerably after a certain age—vibrant colors suddenly leaching to the gray of a drug commercial for depression. She can feel the window closing, the pane trembling. If some parents get crazy about making sure their kids start piano at such a formative age (and then, even after practice has begun on time, lose sleep over untapped chords), just imagine how deeply it hurts Becky to stand before the image of the window closing on authentic identity. How could her heart not writhe? 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 soul.

Spine bowed beneath the invisible tonnage of these decisions, arm hairs tingling with the static of what looms—Arlo finds himself hollowed out by silence. His voice, too green to this world (let alone to a grown-up circus where children are weaponized for clout as readily as they are mined for TikTok likes), would hardly qualify as a reed in the gale. What could that voice be but a breath still learning to gather itself? The path ahead—the way it looms proof that even blackness can glow—darkens by the second into a clarity usually reserved for light, albeit—so it should be said, if only for some levity—not as dark as if “his truth” told him he was a pirate (which could even involve, depending on the style of pirate, poking out an eye and chopping off a hand and starting a rum habit): puberty blockers perhaps as early as nine; doubt-nuking hormone therapy, paired with pitch-sanding vocal training (not just YouTube mimicry, but clinician-led mastery), perhaps as early as fourteen; scalpels starting to slice (if only for nipple repositioning, not the more invasive phallectomy), rotary burrs starting to grind (if only to shave down Arlo’s already-large Adam’s Apple, not the more invasive chin tapering), cannula starting to suck (if only to provide a little lower-abdominal smoothing, not the more invasive full pear-silhouette contour), syringes starting to squirt (if only to give a little lip plump, not the more invasive butt plump) perhaps as early as sixteen—Amsterdam style. These milestones—fetishized, sanctified, and in some corners of the rainbow circle celebrated more fervently than abortion parties with cakes of zero candles—are sanctioned by a society that, too giddy on profit to consider the Co2-microplastic arc of even the nearest aftermath, sees a boy in a tutu as not just a boy in a tutu but as a prophecy in motion: a chrysalis waiting to crack into a glittering ice princess, into an Elsa of the gender galaxy singing “♪ Let it Go ♪” liberty in falsetto (arms raised to conjure a social storm).

Think of the heroin junkie, nupping in a living room chair like a booster-seated toddler lulled by the hum of tires on asphalt. The junkie hears the doorbell, its constancy a function of multiple sources of overdose worry, not as a signal (someone is at the door) but rather as just another environmental element (a noise only amplifying the irritation of the sun noise slicing through curtains he is too blitzed to close). Becky and Karen, many of us might be quick to think here, make the inverse mistake: taking mere environmental element (Arlo in a tutu) as a signal (Arlo is a girl)—reading every flutter and twitch as divine telegraphy. It is tempting to say that, just as the junkie here is deluded by chemicals, Becky and Karen are deluded by creed. But we need to hold our quick-to-rage horses. Even in the philosophy classroom, where the highest standards of intellectual rigor are in play, the fact that billions believe in God ought to give skeptics at least some pause. Does that prove God exists? Of course, not. But it keeps the disbeliever honest. It is something the disbeliever cannot just casually dismiss. The same applies in the case of Becky and Karen. With the shocking rise of trans toddlers and trans cats (soon even trans poltergeists), perhaps we should not be so quick to look down on Becky and Karen’s way of thinking—so aligned as that way of thinking is to the beat of the times.

Right or wrong, though, one thing is clear. To cast Becky and Karen as demons is to miss the mark. They are groomers, no doubt. But then again, so are we all. Who will cast the first stone? Grooming is just another word for shaping, and shaping is what humans do. We sculpt the world in our image, often without knowing our own hands are moving. True, these two are maestros of manipulation—purple-haired spellcasters whose enchantments drone beneath even their own brainwash radar. But is not manipulation the lingua franca of life itself? Even plants engineer their surroundings: black walnut roots shove through soil in search for moisture, muscling out and even poisoning whatever lies in their way; lianas vines circumnutate in a spiraling ballet until they latch onto a sturdier neighbor, hitching a free ride sunward; rafflesia flowers burrow into other plants whose nutrients they siphon, blooming on stolen strength. Even a stone’s mute presence bends the flow of the World-All—its gravity, its capillary action for the rainwater that will later freeze and crack it, a subtle spell.

Becky and Karen swing an ideological hammer. There is no dodging that. But their hammer beats down in lockstep with the rhythm of the prevailing zeitgeist. These two white allies would scoff at the charge, of course. They imagine themselves embattled rebels, persecuted underdogs swimming against the tide—panting in vain, so they would even say, since “whiteness knows no cure.” They might even believe it. Who are we to say otherwise? Yet this fable of fight-the-man heroism triggers spit-takes. How could we not guffaw with soda-nostril incredulity when every release from Disney, an unmatched weathervane—and even manufacturer—of America’s dominant values for over a hegemonic century (beaming into over two-hundred million streaming homes), hoists—just like every major media outlet, every HR department (from Google to Goldman Sachs, from Amazon to the CDC)—the same antiracist-rainbow banners as Becky and Karen’s Kia?

That tight alignment—corporations, campuses, cul-de-sacs all humming with the same sermon—is actually a point in Becky and Karen’s favor. It does not absolve them. Collusion with power rarely does. But it softens the charge—an attenuating factor. Moral psychology requires more than just judging actions in isolation. We must account for context. Picture a person today who ups and decides to buy a slave on the black market. Picture him skulking around whatever champagne-caviar auction Sean Combs once used to attend, quick to raise his greedy bidding paddle for the pre-peach-fuzzed white and pink of newborn constriction. Set that person against his 1724 Virginian doppelganger—only, of course, the meat is brown and pink. Pushing aside the moral-responsibility implication of the everyone-off-the-hook fact that not one iota of anything we do or think finds its backstopping source within us, we can grant for the sake of the argument that both these buyers, these men with a tetragrammaton sweet tooth for slaves, are blameworthy. But surely the man yesterday, purchasing a slave as part of ordinary household logistics, is less so. Back then, chattel slavery was as American as a road trip—woven into the tapestry of everyday life: sanctioned, unremarkable, unexamined, and yet a loadbearing wall.

The relevance of this distinction should be clear. Becky and Karen, like the man of yesterday, enjoy partial acquittal. Such acquittal is a function of status quo’s pull. It is a pull that sense most nosediving toward the gravitational center, like a star that wanders too close to its anchoring blackhole. Conformity is not a minor influence for mammals like us: social creatures groomed over eons to fear exile like death, our neurobiology wired—as fMRI scans readily confirm—to treat exclusion like bodily pain. But the point should not be understated. The stakes are high. Some failures to conform (like sporting last season’s skinny jeans) result in minor inconvenience (Instagram shade and snickers from the girls in the hallway) whereas others (like being an atheist in the time of Spinoza) result in major harms (excommunication, even death).

We are closer to the latter side of the spectrum in the case of Becky and Karen. The pull on Becky and Karen is no mere peer pressure thing out of some afterschool special: “Hey kid. Wanna take a hit of some reefer?” It is much closer, no mere whimsy but part of the infrastructure, to the pull of the slavery institution on southern whites three hundred years ago. Slavery—all-too-common across cultures and times—was so integral to American society (almost a third of southern households owning slaves by 1750), so much depended on it (like the red wheelbarrow of Williams’s placid reflection), that it would have required monumental effort and sacrifice to stop—the sort of radical refusal that few other than rock-bottom addicts, saints, or lunatics could muster. We experience something like this currently. Everyday we consume factory-tortured meat. We continue to reach for the shrink-wrapped steak, even those of us who now it is morally atrocious, because it is there and cheap and is what we all do. Imagine all the personal sacrifice (the social costs, the physical toll) quitting would require—perhaps more sacrifice, hooked on animal carcass as we are, than what America had to go through to end its addiction to slavery.

Antiracism’s pull, while not the scale of slavery yesterday or factory-meat today, is not to be underestimated. The moral ecosystem in which Becky and Karen live is just as totalizing, if not quite as violent. Mega dollars—book deals, speaking circuits, consulting gigs—are dished out to those who repeat the shakedown gospel of how bad blacks and trans people have it, how there is a force of whiteness ever out to oppress BIPOC and LGBTQ peoples. Pushing a mission to sideline equality in favor of equity, the DEI-industrial complex ballooned to nearly eight billion just in 2022 (fueling speakers who hymn black and trans suffering under whiteness’s boot). Corporate HR departments now prioritize ideological conformity over competence, as whistleblower cases have shown. The incentives are clear: celebrate the right values and reap the benefits. Challenge them and risk everything.

Becky and Karen are college educated. That detail carries weight. Higher education, after all, has long ago shifted from temple of inquiry to factory of dogma, and anyone not under a rock—even welders who can barely read—know (at least in their own way) what the prevailing dogma is: that the boogeyman of whiteness relentlessly stalks and strangles BIPOC and LGBTQ lives on every sidewalk, store, and screen. True, Becky and Karen attended college back before things unhinged into full Salem witch mode (spectral-visitation testimonies in kangaroo courts, all of it), back before the sight of a Dominican friar clutching rosary beads or of a stray zip-tie dropped from a custodian’s cart could trigger campus-wide lockdown “for the safety of vulnerable groups”—the former mistaken for a Klansman with a Kunta whip, the latter for a symbolic noose “meant to terrorize black students already shouldering too much in a predominately-white world on a predominately-white campus learning a predominantly-white curriculum” (misfires of interpetation, mind you, not always perpetrated by fagulous white “allies” in scarves but, sadly and disturbingly, even by some black students who, in light of all the incentives in a system that rewards victimhood, have internalized the trauma-in-every-tree-branch narrative repeated like hypnosis by their sworn protectors: these very fagulous whites). The timing of their college attendance, however, has much less relevance than it might seem. For Becky and Karen have not followed the typical pattern of getting more conservative with age. Indeed, they could march straight back onto campus today and—kneeling in safe spaces in the morning and flagging problematic speech in the afternoon—gather enough social capital to make the neon-haired teens in their circle bitter with jealousy. And what makes them especially dangerous is that their credentials and LinkedIn polish give them more pull than that of ten gender-studies undergrads with bullhorns bleating about cisnormativity.

Becky and Karen, the main point is, do more than just toe the boogeyman-of-whiteness line. Given the conflux of their wisdom and passion and activism, they could be counted among the guardians of that line and all its canons—a core one being, of course, that dissent equals hate. Since this line aligns tightly with the status quo, the power of that equation is not to be underestimated. To raise an eyebrow at puberty blockers for ten-year-olds, or to question if misgendering really counts as “violence” (when, according to the line, it is), is not just to invite head-shakes of pity at how confused you are but—unless you make a heartfelt public apology and recant and sign up for remediation courses in right think—to risk, on pretense of safety, social and professional exile. The consequences are tangible. Polls indicate that fewer than fifteen percent of Gen Z individuals would consider dating someone skeptical of “woke" narratives. But it gets worse than being blocked off from non-one-way sex strokes—although it should be said that, in a kinky place like this, there might very well still be opportunities, so long as you do not try to deny your problematic nature but instead lean into it (even if it means using the hard-r “nigger” between the sheets), to find someone who wants to screw (race-play stuff is always a big hit) a problematic, a nazi, a triggerer (these labels all converging into one). It gets worse because there is now, in the trigger-happy era where reality-TV melodrama has synergized with a culture of intolerance, the danger of being deplatformed and blocked from respectable employment. Case in point is Gina Carano’s outing from Disney for heterodox social-media posts, an outing bound to happen even if none of those posts saw the light of day—bound to happen, unless Disney was prepared to become a Judas target like Tesla would a few years later, given that her Twitter profile committed the cardinal sin of mocking pronoun usage by swapping “she / her / hers” with something more appropriate to R2D2: “beep / bop / boop.”

Is it any wonder, in such a Bradbury-meets-Hawthorne dystopia, that well-over half of all Americans feared job loss in 2021 not for shooting a load upon a coworker’s pantyhose in the elevator or even just asking her to watch as you shoot the load into one of the plastic plants around the office but merely for uttering words that might be considered triggering—triggering, here is the wild rub, mainly to those that the powers that be, Becky and Karen’s side, deem “protected kinds?” The fear, despite its toll on health, seems wise now that words draw cuffs: well over three thousand arrests were made in the UK alone for so-called “malicious speech” on social media from 2017-2022, trans-critical speech being a big one—over thirty arrests a day is the current figure. The cancelation of voices hinting at heterodoxy, especially in universities, in the Trump-hysteria era was worse than what we saw from the censoring, silencing, and shaming of those with the unfortunate luck of having the merest degree of separation to a communist sympathizer in the McCarthy era. From 2016–2021, over two hundred academics were deplatformed or fired for heterodoxy—twice the number in half the time of what we seen during the red scare (1947-1957). Becky and Karen hunt whiteness sympathizers like white-bread Americans once hunted commie sympathizers, both in their own times hailed as heroes.

Becky and Karen’s lockstep march with the dominant attitude in the nation should not be overstated. Pinning down the American pulse, after all, is fraught with difficulty. First, the national attitude, like a language, is ever-changing. The speed of shift is even greater in the internet age, too fast even for Disney to keep track of and bank on (which comes with the bright side that maybe, in the greater uncertainty surrounding what the populace wants, it will create art from the soul instead of from what will rake in the most dough). Second, even at one particular slice of time it can be difficult to pin down the pulse. NBA baselines and jerseys, in the narrative present, are much less full of slogans like “I Can't Breathe" or “Stop White Supremacy.” Many companies, moreover, are rolling back their DEI policies and LGBTQ+ initiatives. And yet every team in the MLB (except the Texas Rangers) still hosts Pride Night and NASCAR still bans the confederate flag and Walmart has a whole line of “Phluid” clothing: “Any Cock-Le-Doo” above a rainbow rooster, or “Gay AF” under a rainbow, or “Come out come out wherever you are” superimposed over a rainbow, or checkboxes next to “Cute,” “Gay,” and “Ready to Slay,” or so on. Third, even if there were no rollbacks, and even if every hockey stick needed to be taped up in rainbow colors, and even if every catcher (even the ones on the Texas Rangers) happily squatted behind home plate with the crotch cut out, and even if every outfielder started prancing for the ball like Richard Simmons or Lamar Latrelle from Revenge of the Nerds—none of that would necessarily mean that the ideology embodied is the fuck-whiteness-fuck-free-speech one of which Becky and Karen are druid-cloaked priests. Fourth, there are likely many people with more even-keel views (“moderates”) keeping their heads low—so as not to be branded “transphobe,” or have to go through “reeducation workshops” entitled “dismantling workplace whiteness” just to keep their garbage-man jobs.

Even if the answer is complicated when it comes to how aligned the nation is with Becky and Karen’s ideology, that does not matter much. For their circle is what counts: their circle is tightly aligned and tightly patrolled at every square inch of the border. This is a time, after all, where more and more of us are locked away in cyber silos: places, often euphemistically termed—indeed, eerily termed, given how poisonous they are—“safe-spaces,” where our ideas are never challenged, where we only encounter (at least in any serious fashion beyond caricature) likeminded views. Tribalistic echo-chambers have long been an organic outcrop of creatures like us, prone as we are to beat with Kubrick femurs that which is odd or that which is at odds with our beliefs or that which puts our way of life in a bad light—all three identical in the logic of triggered cancelers for good. But now Big Tech’s algorithms amplify division simply because it boosts engagement. Even crazier is the rise in those who defend cyber bubbles as healthy, as a matter of mental wellbeing. TikTok is full of dolts insisting, to finger-snapping applause, that we cut off anyone who does not “validate” our truth—yes, it is all about personal truth, that is how fine-grained the fractioning goes in this era of I-feel-x-is-true-so-it-must-be, and those who do not abide are “toxic.” Perhaps such defenders have Stockholm Syndrome from the ravages of the algorithm, from the trigger-warning universities and all their mollycoddling safe spaces where “vulnerable populations” (how demeaning) can be protected even from unsettling statistics (especially if delivered by professors of colonialist optics). Perhaps they just know what sells.

Whatever the reason, the main point here is that Becky and Karen are druidesses of this anti-diversity ethos—a fact, crucial for understanding the womb that continues to incubate Arlo, that can easily go unnoticed in our lazy-uncritical-superficial time of judging mainly in terms of outward appearance. For their bumper stickers and fridge magnets shout “Diversity” in rainbow colors—shout this, somewhat oddly, mere inches away from “Speech is Violence” and “Trust Only the Oppressed” and “No Debate with Hate” and “Punch a TERF” and “SAFE SPACES are not just for STICKS and STONES.” Yes, Becky and Karen openly claim what those in their circle would not think to question: that unsettling people—well, unsettling “vulnerable populations”—is among the worst of sins; that anyone who does not agree with them (who does not validate their truth) is “problematic” or “toxic” or “white-centric” (these three pretty much interchangeable too). The overall implication is a sanctification of spiritual agoraphobia—no bueno given how much our physical agoraphobia has grown in an era when everything, not just pizza and plastic pussies, can be delivered to the door. The overall implication is, in other words, a celebration of isolation from challenge, a fundamental assault on diversity and inclusion.

Becky and Karen—who they are and what they are about, even simply how they look—might call forth our most vile fantasies: arms pulled back to the limit as they kneel, and then the boot crushing brainstem to curb. And the fantasies might even take on a snuff-sex dimension if we cannot stop their sick story, which they like to repeat and repeat at trans-rights marches, from intruding upon our sleep like a TV-ad jingle: “Lila’s been telling us she’s a girl since before she could even speak.” “Lila’s been telling us she’s a girl since before she could even speak.” “Lila’s been telling us she’s a girl since before she could even speak.” But understand—if not for the sake of truth, then at least for avoiding prison—that they are well-meaning people. They are not scheming villains. True, they go to these marches, as Becky puts it in her white-knit beanie, “to support Lila’s access to the medical care she desperately needs” or, as Karen puts it in her Carhart-style utility jacket, “to ensure Lila’s right to be who she is: she’s not going to let anyone silence her and we’re not going to stand in her way.” But however demonic these words might sound, however much they incite a bloodthirst that would make Kubrick’s droogs look like choir boys, we must keep perspective. Think about it. Here we have two active mothers marching to support their child. How many parents can say that? Yes, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. But that does not mean we should utterly ignore good intentions. Becky and Karen’s actions, anyways, look less like individual cruelty and more like the downstream consequence of cultural machinery. It seems especially hard, or at least unfair, to blame them when the status quo harshly penalizes deviants.

Becky and Karen, again, are groomers. Their whispers of “freedom” and “fluidity” come with a gravitational pull beneath it all. Even as they chirp “You are free to be anything,” the invisible clause hangs just behind the final syllable: as long as anything does not mean white, straight, cis, or normative in any other oppressive way. Not only do they use trails of rainbow breadcrumbs instead of leashes, their grooming of Arlo toward girlhood is inadvertent. It is much more an unintended consequence of their biases than a mustache-twirling machination. Had Arlo grown into a camouflage-wearing, football-loving, truck-drawing boy; had he been all about superheroes and slingshots and pizza rolls and (ugh) gravity-bound ideas like “men should protect their families”—well, it is not that Becky and Karen would disown him. Let us not be dramatic. They would simply regard him the way an old poet might regard a child who becomes an accountant: with a silent ache, like something luminous has been lost. A subtle sigh would appear in the kitchen and living room not and then. The sigh would echo from every curated poster and bumper sticker and tote and mug and fridge magnet like a disappointed choir: you were meant to be more. But he would be loved and they would be proud. And it would not be as if they thought they failed.

Take these considerations into account. Take also into account that even in the minor grooming role Becky and Karen do play, there are many more hands involved. Arlo was groomed by the whole ecosystem: the therapists who, like Flat Earthers, alchemy all counterevidence and criticisms of trans ideology into support for that ideology; the pediatric endocrinologists who treat puberty like a tumor; the content creators who farm identity for clicks; the educators who, more committed to slogans than nuance, pass out coloring sheets featuring a unicorn with top surgery scars beneath a rainbow armband; the culture that has confused affirmation with care, volume with truth, visibility with freedom.

Should not such considerations stay our hand, stay our ungreased double-fist from the most brutal of bound-and-gagged colonic ruptures—worse, yes, than the worst of what has befallen those who visit Washingtonian ranches to fulfill their stallion kinks? But then again, understanding is not exoneration; a mitigating factor is not an alibi. None of the members of the Manson family got even a smidge of leniency in the courts. Just following orders—even straight-up brainwashing—did not work in the Nuremburg trials and it is no legal defense today. Attorneys must demonstrate imminent threat for claims like Battered Woman Syndrome to result in reduced culpability for their dick-chopping clients—a vague, even if chronic, fog of fear does not suffice. So if we go by the US court system (itself a big “if”), Becky and Karen’s enchantment by the Svengali-like media at least of their own bubble might not be enough to stop us from taking the plunge. Yet if we insist on retribution, we must at least temper it with perspective. Perhaps memory of the commutation of Patie Hearst’s sentence, President Carter insisting that her indoctrination by the Symbionese Liberation Army made her less culpable of the bank robberies she committed on its behalf—perhaps that will make us at least show the common courtesy of stopping at CVS to grab a few jars of petroleum jelly before the trellis-climbing night raid. Because if we cannot show mercy even to the deluded, how much of our righteousness is simply vengeance by another name?

Where is Arlo in all this? That is precisely the point. He is lost in the political maelstrom, fading like the Polaroid ghost of Marty McFly. Not under erasure (sous rature) like a word crossed out by Derrida (necessary but inadequate), he is simply forgotten—or perhaps, to be less dramatic and more accurate, adequate but unnecessary: a pawn, in effect. He is swamped by the clamor of adults—swamped by them, believe it or not, even more than blacks are swamped by the clamor of white allies. These white allies (Portlandia-looking stewards of the world) are the same adults, the same sanctimonious vectors. They are the ones who insist, in what ironically amounts to one of the biggest signs of the white supremacy their wails lie about being too alive and well, how wrecked black people are, their cries a whip sharper than any overseer’s. Their poison has even begun to infect, just like the America’s saccharine slop of fast food and pop music, the healthiest blacks in the world-stage beyond America: the shining glories of human intelligence and promise for the future; the keepers of the fire just like medieval scribes were keepers of the Greek light; the tenders of the flame alongside the Chinese and the Japanese—who should, quite frankly, flee to pastures more enlightened than our dimwitted shores if the anti-Asian racism of our Kardashian cesspool, a much realer racism than the one given all the lip service, refuses to admit them (all to keep the gravy-train of spoiling handouts flowing to blacks, of course) to the top spots meritocracy demands. Yes, the fixings of special treatment—however much they synergize with Cardi B and McDonalds to ruin the spirit, however much they lock blacks with honeyed shackles on a plantation of dependency—have become increasingly hard to resist even for the best of the best blacks from African and Caribbean nations, those comparative wunderkinds who come here with intellectual skills that make laughing stocks of the typical American and whose success here radically flouts that whole bunk money-making myth of a machine rigged against blacks as opposed to the truth of the matter: a machine rigged against shit culture, regardless of race or color or creed—albeit even this does not even seem true like it was just twenty years ago, the equity agenda continuing to plummet standards across the board (especially when it comes to blacks) in a time where twerking is required at political rallies like proclamations of faith once were.

It is enough to snap the sane. It is enough to make you—or at least anyone clear-eyed enough (recall the Black Elder that confronted Becky and Karen) to go to the white source instead of building resentment toward downstream blacks (as is unfortunately what mainly will happen given how fucked the American intellect is)—want to storm the colleges, boot-heel the doors of every safe space room, snap the necks of ever therapy bunny and companion pet (unfortunate collateral), and then fist all these white weavers of woe. It makes you want to drive right to the motherfucking elbow, all along the way making those wriggling-twisting gestures that surgeons do when the nurse preps them with the purple gloves: fingers writhing into dogma’s fetid core. It makes you—to highlight the whole white-guilt-means-blacks-keep-getting-agency-stultifying-and-dignity-ravaging-super-citizen treatment industry in one microcosmic example—crave payback for their making a world where AI will refuse to proofread your fiction (“I cannot engage with this offensive request") if your narrator dreams of fisting blacks (there are workarounds, though, like saying that the perspective is of Kyle Rittenhouse, social-media’s black slaughterer), on the one fist, but will respond with its programmed people-person cheer (and, of course, the mandatory tweak of “black” to “Black”) if your narrator dreams of fisting whites, on the other.

And yet when the lens finally finds the crowded-out Arlo (the quiet cipher, much quieter than Waldo, at the epicenter of all this multicolored pageantry), we find in the zoom more reason to pause—more reason to reconsider our appetite for the clarifying fire of violence, the violence that offers some semblance of footing within the ever-spinning kaleidoscope of ideology. We find more reason not to gather up (especially not at the CCTV-lit Walmart like some Netflix-era amateur) the tools necessary to “resolve” the reality of two women who handed their child over to a rabid-toothed mythos: the chlorine bleach (for DNA, mostly seminal); the nitrile gloves (for fingerprints); the contractor-grade trash bags (for heavy garden gnomes, naturally); the bone saw (for . . . well); the foot-plate shovel (for the root-choked loam of the Northeast); the linesman pliers (for dental-record teeth); the lighter fluid (for the tartan scarves); the pelletized garden lime (for the stench). The homicidal checklist slides back into the coat pocket—for now—because of Arlo. Aside from the emotional toil of robbing him of his mothers, there is another reason. Controversial as the words might sound in a culture increasingly allergic to the faintest whiff of “victim blaming” (although perhaps less allergic these days judging by the grotesque carnival of “Fuck-that-lil-parasite” abortion parties now livestreamed—no sense of shame or squeamishness—from the Planned Parenthood tarmac, crop tops hoisted to flaunt flat bellies free of the stretch marks that would have been caused by what one’s lying heart would think was the true victim), it seems these words must be said: despite being a vulnerable child locked in Becky and Karen’s ideological gravity, Arlo himself bears some responsibility.

Arlo, of course, did not choose the stage he was pushed onto. The theater of gendered performance, lit by the footlights of adult applause, was not something he scripted. Nevertheless, the line between grooming and growing up is porous. Despite being small and swaddled in Becky and Karen’s dragnet of identity affirmation, Arlo does bear some responsibility—not in the courtroom or theological sense and definitely not in an ultimate sense (since no here where a buck stops is ever a human’s will even in the case of voluntary action), but rather in the quiet causative sense that he was a contributing factor; the diluted sense, the arguably nonmoral sense, that he simply was an ingredient in the mix. Arlo’s blameworthiness, that of a non-villainous variable, falls somewhere between the blameworthiness of the safari cheetah who, although seemingly tame inside the jeep, suddenly snatches a baby held out for a selfie and the blameworthiness of the college coed who, clapping her pantyless cheeks in the musky choreography of an Amazonian summoning ritual (her skirt, a mere formality, perhaps better called “a belt”), suddenly feels a double-finger dip from a stranger she cannot identify in the thick.

How is it exactly that Arlo is not wholly example from blame? It is deeper than just that Arlo, like all creatures embedded in the machinery of reward and punishment, eventually was bound to adapt—pirouetting, in his case, to the cues on offer, which its itself (albeit in an embryonic way) a kind of agency. Arlo bears blame because his very nature shapes his responses and choices. We are not born blank slates, perfectly equal to one another. Some are more sensitive than others, softer clay, from before birth. That is true of Arlo. Notice what this means, then, for those who say that Arlo’s blame is the blame merely of a mirror that reflects what is shown or of the tuning fork that vibrates at the milieu’s pitch, a rhetoric we hear from those wary about trans ideology’s impact on children—from those, that is to say, who cite the dark litany of relevant likelihoods surrounding young transitioners: the likelihood that children lack the maturity, their brains still baking throughout their twenties, to set themselves on an irreversible path; the likelihood of medical risks on bone density, fertility, and long-term cardiovascular health; the likelihood that the trans fad could become an even bigger social contagion than it already is, amplifying the various woes that come from hasty but major decisions; the likelihood that gender dysphoria is a symptom of underlying psychological issues like anxiety, depression, autism; the likelihood that schools, medical professionals, and legal systems will bypass parental rights and rush children into affirming care without thorough psychological evaluation; the likelihood, as we have seen with the rise of detransition stories (and as we know from out own teen tattoos), that children grow up to regret irreversible changes made during youth; the likelihood that teaching children that biological sex is mutable undermines scientific truths and could confuse their understanding of reality; and so on. If one is going to use that mirror-and-tuning-fork rhetoric, then—in light of the very fact that no one is born a blank slate—one should respond in kind by pointing out that mirrors and tuning forks have peculiar natures (natures very different than Platonic forms and magma, from turtles and cocaine). Wordplay, in short, cannot take all the heat off of Arlo.

The point should be clear enough. But let us make it more concrete. Not every kid would have responded in the same way as Arlo in the exact same circumstances. That highlights the non-null degree to which Arlo’s nature is to blame. So needy of parental validation (needier than most children), Arlo had learned early on to lean hard into identity as a form of currency for loving attention. His cognitive grasp of gender is embryonic at best, a mist of impressions and cues. But he is astute enough to recognize the glint of parental delight, to feel its radiant warmth as a kind of roadmap. The correct path to take is one drawn out not with overt instructions but with glances, with beaming pride, with the soft coercion of celebration. Young and underdeveloped in cognitive tools, he travels that path not because it feels true but because it feels loved—plunging onward even if it means into an identity that could feel inauthentic. He leans into girlhood not because it pulses from within but because it reflects from without. Even the mounting interventions—therapy, pharmaceuticals, social reinforcement, procedures that luckily (luckily at least from one perspective) will make it harder and harder to feel that this identity is inauthentic—become part of the scaffolding that holds him in place. The further in he goes, the harder it becomes to hear the voice that first whispered dissonance.

And yet that inner voice may never disappear. That is the gamble—to use here an idiomatic expression that seems, upon little reflection, inappropriate considering how hard it is to picture Arlo walking up to the blackjack dealer knowingly to place a bet. However chemically hushed, surgically redirected, or socially soothed, the voice of conscience rarely dies so easily—muttering beneath Poe’s floorboards of consciousness, a rasping contradiction inside the mind. If you ever wondered why (rocking in corners, tearing their hair out to be validated) there are all these kids demanding that their pronouns be respected (“or else”), it is because—well, at least when it comes to the marginal few who are not, solely at least, doing this to bully teachers and parents and entire institutions in some Machiavellian power grab—the voice keeps creeping up (just like the voice does inside the drunk whose lying heart keeps saying “this is, this has to be, the last drink”). They are begging the world to keep their constructed reflection polished and intact because when it cracks, even a little, the voice leaks through with clarity as opposed to just subwoofer thump (like when the rattling car on the corner rolls down the windows, clarifying the lyrical treble above the bass).

The voice tends to be, by what some call “the divine spark: and what others call “whiteness,” more tenacious than bamboo and kudzu and vetiver. That is true. But maybe—just maybe—science will someday silence the voice without killing the human who carries it. Perhaps enough estrogen and scalpel slices and glitter hugs and social accolades and Clockwork-Orange-style eyes-pinned-open reinforcements or so on can do the job, effectively pulling someone like Arlo out of that no-man’s land (pun intended) where the voice ends up seeding (at least in the soil of living in misalignment with that voice) all sorts of negative downstream consequences. Such consequences might not be as dramatic as suicide, one of the big plagues upon this population of transformers (mostly Decepticons)—and quite understandably: what more effective treatment for the voice than a good demapping, the elimination of one’s own however-long-tinkered-with map? The consequences might be much less purple—no piss and shit for family members to cleanup: difficulty forming authentic relationships (always feeling perhaps like an imposter) or growing resentment (if we have resentment towards our parents for smoking in our faces everyday or for okaying the circumcision when we were just babies, just imagine what could rise after an adult wakes up one morning to find his body hacked up like a campy horror film). These alone, the disconnection and bitterness, could be bad enough. And this is even assuming the unlikely possibility, unlikely in no small part due to the bullying and lying and due-process-violating excesses of SJW activism, that the all-too-American pendulum fails to swing hard in a trans-unfriendly direction not only where trans infants—even black trans infants, simply there cooing in the stroller—will become targets of applause-worthy name calling (“Little fucking nigglet faggot!”) instead of their delusional white parents but also where due process will be violated in all hawk-tua manner of illiberal retribution.

The hope that science provides when it comes to the silence or eradication of the voice is based in the fact that we are, largely at least, meat-bags with buttons: press here and we hallucinate Jesus, press there and we get pedophilic urges—one flick of neural real estate and you reliably get an out-of-body serenity indistinguishable from the visions of Himalayan mystics; the smallest injury to the frontal lobe and a hardworking amiable father, a good Christian family-man, transforms into an irreverent curmudgeon balls deep in the rabbit hole of child porn, unable to stop chasing footage of that electron-cloud sweet spot where maximal youth meets maximal moaning complicity (even if it means reaching out to smut peddlers so obviously FBI agents in disguise). Identity, in this light, is less sacred essence than tweakable illusion. And if that is true, how could there not be hope—with all the smashing-protons-together-at-near-light-speed science we have today—to drown the voice of conscience for good without leaving any of the sort of subconscious traces or emotional fragments (those whispers deep down in the amygdala or basal ganglia) that led Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet to reconnect after they each underwent complete memory erasure procedures to help them move on in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

To be fair and present both sides, however, one might very well argue that the effort to kill the voice without killing the host succeeds only by killing something else: the self. Perhaps the lengths one would have to go to kill the voice (or even just make the voice completely unheard) without killing the human would entail, in other words, killing the person. Settling the matter goes beyond our purposes here, of course. For that would involve grappling with the various questions surrounding the metaphysics of personal identity. Is the person who woke up this morning truly the same as the one who went to sleep last night, let alone two thousand nights prior? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a person at one time to be identical to a person at another time? Is continuity, assuming there is continuity, grounded in materiality (a person remains the same from t1 to t2, for example, so long as some core portion of his brain remains in the same configuration between t1 and t2) or is it grounded in psychology (a person remains the same from t1 to t2, for example, so long as he has the memory at t2 of himself at t1) or is it grounded in some extra-mental soul (a person remains the same from t1 to t2, for example, so long as the immaterial ghost inside his body remains the same from t1 to t2)? Can personal identity be reduced to simpler components or is it an irreducible, fundamental property? And so on.

More urgent questions come first. What is consent in a world of soft coercion? What is innocence when love becomes a tool of indoctrination? But even these require effort that would take us too far afield. Here the best we can do is to end with compassion and understanding rather than accusation. Imagine how many caught up in the fashion of gender dysphoria are ultimately terrorized by the voice: “Fake”; “You’re just confused”; “You’ll never pass”; “You’re betraying yourself”; “This is just a trend like mullets or baggy jeans, but much more gruesome”; “Imposter”; “Sicko”; “Mentally ill”; “Wow, you’re gonna regret this.” Even if the voice is divine, that does not mean it is friendly. The angels of the Bible did not always whisper. Sometimes they annihilated, blowing humans to bits, simply by being beheld. 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 or, God forbid, deadnamed. It is easy to demonize these people, especially given how successful they have been at hurting others for misgendering them. It is especially-squared easy in the wake of the 2016 to 2022 horrors, which saw employees and even professors fired without due process for just that; horrors that have resulted in countless let-a-thousand-flowers bloom out-and-proud progressives, ravaged as they were by the topsy-turvy witch hunts, making uncomfortable bedfellows with—if not ultimately joining—conservatives as radical as (and so as essentially identical to, like pop rap and pop country) the le wokisme cancelers of speech and lives—continuing the blood feud with the passion of a child who grows up into a suicide bomb of payback for the bald eagle’s bombing of his village. Oh how easy it can become to crave retributive due-process-violating responses to these tyrants in progressive clothing: even if it means ushering in a dictator who, despite the risk that we ourselves might suffer the same fate, would corral these types in sardine-tight boxcars on a one-way track to the carceral pits of San Salvador—all of it justified perhaps by the tried-and-true righteous-sounding proclamations that we are protecting the children (the same desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures rationale that had professors on the chopping block just for wearing the triggering color red against their alabaster skin of oppression).

But look deeper. See not monsters, but people drowning. When we extend even a sliver of empathy toward the transformers (especially those architects of bully meltdowns), when we appreciate just how desperately they need the world to validate that inner-voice-muzzling make-believe, it is easy to understand why they would rage as if their lives depended on it. Because, in a sense, their lives do. Fantasy is all that keeps them afloat—and barely afloat at that. And when the fragile raft of fantasy is all that keeps you afloat on the choppy sea of doubt (your own body not playing along, cramping up with even the slightest water-treading gestures), the world must bow to the script—or else! For a world that refuses to play along—a world, in effect, that starves or even siphons away the oxygen of validation—amounts, by the logic of “lived experience,” to spiritual murder. And hell hath no fury like a trans-woman scorned! Anyone short of sainthood would lash out, if only via that scream—that scream now as common to campus quads as frisbee (at least before we learned of the unbearable whiteness not only of frisbees and baseballs but of catch in general). Here the scream, the battered-breath scream at the world either dragging them under or content to let them thrash, becomes the final intact thing they have.

Humans scream for many reasons. Aristotle himself would struggle to enumerate all the species: the existential scream, which emerges from the unbearable awareness of being flung into this jagged existence as pre-scribbled slates only to be obliterated without knowing why (see Munch’s The Scream); the mortal terror scream, which erupts in recognition of it being our neck’s turn to feel death’s cold scythe (see Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes); the ecstatic scream, which geysers at the peaks of sexual or spiritual or psychic rapture (see Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa); the infantile scream, which splits the air from primal needs unmet (see Lowrey’s Screaming Babies); the grief scream, which pours forth after loss’s cruel theft (see Meredith’s Three Faces of Grief)—the startled scream, the victory scream, and so on down the human catalogue.

The scream in play here belongs to a rarer species: the retributive scream—in particular, a last-ditch lash at vengeful wounding. Most retributive screams either dissipate into the indifferent winds of deaf ears or make the target salivate in knowledge that they have gotten under the skin. The screams of Beckys and Karens, and the brood they spawn—these, however, are the serrated exception. Like the fifth and sixth trumpet blasts by the angels of Revelation, these screams herald the brimstone reek of ruin. These screams do damage. In an era where ideology (their ideology) demands that skin color and sexual orientation and personal feeling take priority over character and competence and truth; where hiring and admissions committees require blood oaths to equity; where each applicant, even for just a summer job in the lumber department at Lowes or even just for a few night credits at the local community college, must watch as their social-media is scoured for problematic expressions now arrestable in too many places (Darren Brady detained for sharing a meme that depicted Progress Pride flag arranged into the shape of a swastika, a shape-color combo he felt artistically captured—you cannot get better irony than this—the speech-crushing fist of trans ideology; or Chelsea Russell sentenced to eight weeks of community service and fined for a “nigga”-laced elegy to her deceased friend; Harry Miller investigated by police simply for retweeting a limerick deemed “transphobic”; and the list goes on); where college presidents mass-email reminders that white students and faculty and staff are to vacate campus on hallowed days to grant “a bit of breathing room to BIPOC members of the community”; where research and even private speech are gagged if deemed “harmful” or “problematic” to the “marginalized,” to those at once “voiceless” and “disempowered” and yet wielding Saddam’s 1979 purge-list might; where public school curricula are rewritten to center identity narratives over historical accuracy (casting the Founding Fathers, for example, primarily as heteronormative despots while glossing over the constitutional achievements that underpin any hope of reform); where educators who dissent from the dismantle-whiteness decenter-heteronormativity orthodoxy are blacklisted as weavers of harm; where, just as fire departments sideline direct damage reduction in favor of having more nonwhites on staff, NGOs sideline direct poverty reduction in favor of identity workshops (the UN, for example, diverting clean-water funds toward village seminars on “decentering whiteness” taught by a dude in a dress living out a SJW twist on Eat Pray Love); where social media platforms disproportionately suspend or demonetize those who stray from trans dogma; where universities and corporations enforce mandatory pronoun usage and gender-identity policies with the UM-Wolverine snarl once reserved for national security threats and treason; where media conglomerates purge creators (even black ones) deemed insufficiently inclusionary of trans identities and for not showing enough antiracist zeal; where doctors risk license review (the very least) for voicing concerns about the rapid prescription of puberty blockers to minors (their words, especially if delivered with “Eurocentric footnotes” citing peer-reviewed studies on the long-term risks, deemed “insensitive and invalidating white speak”); where physicians must bow to self-named gender even when biological sex is clinically relevant (such as in drug dosages) to honoring the Hippocratic Oath; where athletes are urged, by sponsors and leagues, to swathe themselves in the full rainbow regalia of a Pixar release—in such an era, whipped to safe-space delirium by TDS barbarity, the trans scream (yes, even a white trans scream) carries the world-bending payback power of a gavel slammed down on hetero white testicles. People lose their jobs—they pay bigtime—as a result: censored, silenced, shamed.

Is it really that hard to see why kids raised in the witch-hunt window of 2016-2022 would trip over themselves to snatch up an identity that grants Veruca-Salt dominion, scrambling before the golden ring’s magic wears thin? Dunk-your-teacher booths—those carnival relics where a well-aimed softball unhinges the seat, plunging the authority figure into the cold glug below—were always a cathartic hit for a reason, scratching as they do a primal itch (felt especially by the young) to seize the reins for once: a sanctioned inversion of hierarchal power, a pressure valve for social tension, like the Roman Saturnalia (where slaves would be served by masters) or the Medieval Feast of Fools (where a boy would be crowned bishop for a day and get to lord over the grownups he usually had to bow before). Just picture it, really picture it. Picture yourself a child in a world where Veruca pronoun whims could set off a clean chain reaction (firing, blacklisting, doxxing, foreclosure, family dissolution) that would end with your teacher hanging in a roach-motel closet, shit and piss puddling the polyester carpet. What child—handed that glittering button of righteous extortion, given full institutional blessing to smash it down (again, again, again)—would not be tempted? Be realistic.

Such institutional power, of course, is not guaranteed to last forever. And sure enough, the seams are beginning to split. Look no further than the strategic recalibrations well underway at Disney, a corporation that reads social weather shifts like a Machiavellian barometer and adjusts its opportunistic sails faster than Rhett Butler fleeing Atlanta:

canceling Star Wars: The Acolyte (2024) in realization that the masses have had more than their fill of identity politics and LGBTQ+ sermonizing, craving something (storytelling, character) that might break the monotony of egregious pandering to those who—fattened on the hard-to-hide super-citizen perks of such pandering—can no longer convincingly cosplay as powerless;

pausing the live-action Tangled remake (2025) in fear that another woke retread would bomb even harder than Snow White, since even those who welcome lashes from the absolution whip can only take so many before the pain (if only “just” the pain of mortality-disclosing boredom) sets in;

fast-tracking projects that, if not completely bypassing DEI mandates, at least bury the sermonizing under thicker frosting (perhaps out of dim realization that white-hetero adults, increasingly sacked and canceled by the cruel equity spirit these shows exemplify, find themselves in front of daytime TV more than ever, counting every pathologizing sleight);

scrubbing, like a gambler sober enough to know when to fold, a transgender storyline from the Pixar series Win or Lose;

erasing—slowly but surely—the old PR language of “we aim to prioritize the recruitment of nonwhite and nonheterosexual persons” and replacing it—slick as the best of we-have-always-had-this-couch gaslighting husbands—with the new PR language of “we aim to prioritize the recruitment of the best talent the nation has to offer.”

And the list goes on. Indeed, and as expected (you cannot get more American than this), we are even seeing signs of backlashing bigotry (no mere withdrawal from ideology, but gleeful retaliation against it): rude refusal to call a trans-man “a man,” decency-be-damned insistence on deadnaming, open mockery of “trannies” for being not just biologically and spiritually fake but biologically and spiritually repulsive—vomit emoji, vomit emoji.

But even if their power were guaranteed to stay in place (or at least cemented beyond custom and algorithm and into global law), something in us knows what despots and recess bullies alike know: how pathetic and unsatisfying such power is; how hollow it feels when your “friends” only play with you out of duress, when people only listen to you in fear. Power that demands obedience instead of earns joy is the loneliest kind there is. Anyone (save the soulless psychopath) who rests on such power long enough is bound to find himself sunk into a misery of bleak solitude not unlike that growing within Misery’s Annie Wilkes, a woman who fights that failing fight to blur captivity into connection (even if it requires hobbling the man who tries to leave). It is a depression so profound that it begs not for our rage but for our compassion, so incurable that it demands the farmer’s shovel to the nape—steel driven through spine by a stern and unflinching boot.

Now with Arlo, as with the generational refresh all children provide (an injection of diversity in the status quo, the static code, of the old), we glimpse the radiant light of pr—.

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

“One struggle, one fight: Palestine, trans rights!”

We could end there, Arlo drowned out as ever beneath political chanting. But how overplayed it would be—how all-too-big-algorithm—to end on darkness. Things are bleak, yes. And the bleakness oozes out of even the smallest pores. Arlo, for example, is at present in the backseat of a car, scrunchie that Becky gave him around his wrist, letting the chorus to the Charlie XCX song (“Lila, you’re favorite”) help him chalk up his confusion about whether he is a girl to confusion that just comes naturally to being a girl: “♪ Girl, it's so confusing sometimes to be a girl (girl, girl, girl, girl). Girl, how do you feel being a girl? (Girl, girl, girl, girl) ♪” But there is always light, even if it flickers at meme-speed (glowing not with the neon warmth of eighties futurism but rather with the hyperreal static of a corrupted dream). And, as it turns out, there does seem some room for hope even in our dark corner where dysmorphia finds many roots beyond just microplastics affecting the hormones of amphibian and mammal alike.

The Alpha generation (Arlo’s generation) could easily seem a pathetic punchline to history, an anti-sigma harbinger of humanity’s fate. Look at these goofy-ahh children: mainlining skibidi brainrot whenever they find a quantum ounce of fanum-taxed time; swapping sleep for an endless scroll of AI-slop Rizz Gods weeping as toilets lip-sync blown-speaker Ice Spice. How Ohio simpskwad it could seem, in their language, to watch and watch again cartoon dog-men mukbanging endless glizzys in split-screen with Fortnite emotes. How cringebeta it could seem to be hooked to a screen where some alabaster Only-Fans gateway feeds munchmax pixels to her virtual slime pet while reciting in Slavic accent “Yeet, yeet—drip that nomgasm rizz!” Many schools have resorted, understandably, to banning the hyper-online vocabulary altogether: “Rizz,” “Gyatt,” “mewing,” “Sigma,” “Sus,” and even “Ohio.” Adults shake their heads, diagnosing infantilization and terminal dissociation. But perhaps they are not seeing the bigger picture. What if there is hope even in the retreat into the AI-slop delulu of a sussy Ohio? What if there is grace in the glitch?

With school nurses pushing tampons on boys and ELA teachers insisting that the book is problematic because the author was white and the characters were black (all this right inside of a Rindge-and-Latin school in a Cambridge near you), what if the children being overcome with depression and anxiety when their phones are taken away is not fully reducible to dopamine withdrawal? Perhaps taking away a child’s brainrot, sacred armor in the form of decay, amounts to taking away the hermit crab’s shell. Think of the horror-film trope where the sleepless screams in the mother’s ears turns out to be not the first stages of demonic infestation but rather the interference of guardian angels cockblocking Satan. What if all the dead-eyed noise of gyat skibbidy rizz, for all its potential to bloom into mind malware, is nature’s organic mechanism (like when the brain cuts off circulation to the limbs in freezing water) to jam the suffocating signals of adult sloganeering? What if this endless sludge of glitchy Dada nonsense, the gibberish loop fracturing attention spans like boot-stomped mirrors, is a firewall—a neurological deadbolt slammed shut—against the grooming pull of the ideological buzz? What if the calloused-thumb scroll of infantilized memes, what Pope Francis himself dismissed as “putrefazione cerebrale,” amounts to the holy fidget spinning of a cyber rosary?

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