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The One Good Man Strikes Again
A self-proclaimed supporter of trans kids took a job “reducing stigma” around pedophilia. Even “allies” can be unsafe.
There’s something strange about my memories of adolescence. I call it the black hole. Most years of my life are easy to explain. I know where they started and ended. I have a narrative. Somewhere around middle school, the narrative breaks down. I have shards, a bunch of little moments, and every moment seems violent; I remember spit hitting my face, my head hitting a mirror, a car I couldn’t get out of. Occasionally, my brain will cough up a whole sexual assault — oh, right, that time those boys pinned my arms behind my back and… — which I’d forgotten, not because the memory was so horrible, but because I’d experienced so many assaults that it was hard for any one incident to stand out.
I was visibly non-conforming, when those years began, and I wasn’t by the time they ended. What happened to me was ordinary social conditioning, intended to break me down and teach me compliance; I entered as myself and left as someone who had successfully been assigned a gender. That kind of violence is commonplace for trans children, who have elevated rates of every kind of abuse you can name. Consider the 15-year-old girl targeted for a strip search by the TSA, the 12-year-old doxed by…
