In the Land of Improper Ideology

Dear friend,

This newsletter has rapidly evolved. What started as a professional development tool for medical educators has become a travelogue during a period of historical significance. Which is not to say that I’m historically significant, but a record is a record.

This past week I had the honor of leading workshops for faculty and professional staff of a small liberal arts college located in rural red country.

The workshops were on a topic near and dear to my heart: supporting transgender and non-binary college students.

While the workshops were very much about that, they were also about something else.

It’s not that there was an elephant in the room. It was more of an exploding elephant piñata that covered every person and surface in wet sand, because filling it with glitter would’ve been too gay.

I’m talking, of course, about (gestures wildly in every direction) the current political climate.

Heresy

You can’t talk about transgender and gender non-binary people without talking about biological sex and gender. Specifically, about how those two (independently complex) things are different. Which means I broke with the official government stance in the first few minutes. The heresy didn’t end there.

If you’re curious, here are a few highlights:

• It is intuitively obvious that biological sex and gender are distinct. There is no gene telling you to wear a dress. Testosterone doesn’t bind with affinity to the color blue. There are no laundry secrets in the vaginal wall.

• The core disagreement between “woke gender ideology” and mainstream gender ideology isn’t transgender vs cisgender or boy vs girl. It’s accepting a child as they are or forcing an adult’s opinion upon them. It is just as abhorrent to me to insist that a trans girl is a cis boy as it would be to insist that a cis boy is a trans girl.

• Sometimes strong emotional messaging can overload an otherwise logical person’s capacity for rational thinking. Enter the moral panic about harming children. And so we must say and repeat the truth: no one is advocating for gender-affirming surgical intervention for pre-pubescent children. Care up until puberty is about supporting, talking, and listening, to the child and the child’s community. When a child enters puberty and is concerned about the changes their body will undergo, a licensed medical professional may offer puberty blockers to hit “pause” on puberty to give everyone a little more time. This is safe and 100% reversible. When the adolescent turns 16, they, along with their care team and guardians, can make an informed decision about which hormones should predominate in puberty.

• It is far more dangerous to deny a child’s identity than to accept them for who they are. According to the 2024 Youth Survey by the Trevor Project, 46% of transgender and non-binary youth in America had seriously considered suicide in the prior year. Young people living in very accepting communities considered suicide at half the rate of their peers.

The audience received the information I had prepared and asked thoughtful, clarifying questions.

But as we turned our attention to supporting students in the campus environment, the questions took on a different tenor.

One faculty member asked, “how can I visibly support a trans student if I might be fired, doxxed, detained, and/or deported for doing so?”

I believe it’s important to say when you’re out of your depth. So I did.

I said, “I have expertise on being trans and providing gender-affirming care, but I’ve never had to survive in an autocracy before, so I honestly don’t know.”

This let some of the tension out of the room, but we were still left looking at each other, desperate for answers.

We’ve Crossed the Rubicon

I believe we’re now governed by an authoritarian regime. Some may argue over semantics, but it seems undeniable to me.

Evidence abounds, but a few specific examples:

• The President recently signed an executive order that, among other things, tasks the Vice President with removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution. He provides an example of this impropriety: a sculpture representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement."

• A Tufts graduate student was abducted from the streets of Boston by six plainclothes officers, some with their faces masked. She has not been charged with anything. Her peers and professors know her to be peaceful and introverted, and believe the detention can only be linked to her co-authoring an op-ed critical of the war in Gaza.

• DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a propaganda video using posed inmates at a maximum security prison in El Salvador as a backdrop that is (intentionally?) reminiscent of the crowded bunks of Buchenwald. We do not know who has been imprisoned there by the United States government, but reports indicate that at least some of the inmates are innocent, rule-following members of society targeted due to tattoos and the color of their skin.

This isn’t to say that we are doomed. But we won’t be able to effectively fight back unless we accept the reality of the situation.

Risk Management

As our discussions in the workshop continued, it became clear that we were each considering our ability to tolerate risk. What chances were we willing to take? How would we know when to stick out our necks and when to strategically sit back and live to fight another day?

I, for example, have been invited to lead workshops in other parts of the country. But I’m honestly scared to travel to some places, particularly when that means turning over my identification documents to government authorities. Is it wise to decline for my safety, or would that be obeying in advance?

Wisdom from a True Expert

I’m grateful to have come across an essay by Ned Resnikoff called “Living with a Murderer: On personal responsibility under the second Trump administration”.

I think it’s worth reading in its entirety. The author makes compelling arguments about capitulation and the politics of respectability.

The majority of the piece, however, relays lessons from Hannah Arendt, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.

Resnikoff mainly draws from Arendt’s essay, “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship”.

This essay is an incredibly rich work worthy of much thought and discussion.

One part stands out to me in this moment, when I have so many questions about my obligations. She says this of the “nonparticipants”, who chose not to comply with the Nazi regime:

“[T]hey asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves.”

The choices of if, when, where, and how to resist are personal ones. I don’t presume to know what’s best for anyone else.

Arendt’s argument is that we each have to live with ourselves. We must know ourselves well enough to find the lines that, should we cross them, would haunt us and make living intolerable. Morals applied by external forces can change with the culture or the whims of the ruling class. But it isn’t our peers or rulers whose judgement matters, it’s our own.

The part that I most needed to hear in this moment is easy to miss: “they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all”.

I find this idea freeing and instructive.

Maybe it’s due to the constant influx of opinions and data, but I’ve felt like I need to make every choice based on the impact it might have on the world. Or how people will react to it. Even the most consequential news of the day is framed by pundits and influencers as something that will or won’t “break through”, and by how it will play in this state or with that demographic.

Of course there is a role for strategic thinking, but Arendt reminds us that there’s danger down that path, too.

And so I ask myself: what do I care about? What kind of person am I willing to be?

Standing up is scary. Living with a murderer is scarier.

Thanks for reading. Hang in there, everybody.

Ky

Did you find this newsletter helpful? Forward it to a friend

Are you that friend? Subscribe to this newsletter for free

I’ve been spending [too much] time on Bluesky. If you have an account, you can find me @kyanlynch.bsky.social

This newsletter will always be free.

If your love language is buying people coffee: