My peak trans moment came when my neice recieved fifteen copies of My Princess Boy. My neice is quite the tomboy, you see, definitively preferring “boy” clothes and “boy” haircuts and “boy” activities. Her parents totally let her take the lead in this, and since she’s homeschooled and isn’t allowed mainstream TV, she had a lot of freedom to define her self. Sometimes she got hurt…it always bothered her when people thought she was a boy…but she dealt pretty well.

I’m sure the family and friends who gave her the book meant well. “Look! Here is another child who does things he’s not supposed to do!”…but it quite devastated my niece. Not just because getting fifteen copies of the same book would be upsetting to any six-year-old, but because of the messages that these oh-so-tolerant family and friends had written in the front. Most memorable: the grandparent who wrote -

To Our Prince Girl - You Can Grow Up to Be a Man!

This is not the message of the book! The message of the book is that you can be a boy and like pink and sparkles, and that liking pink and sparkles does not make you any less of a boy! But the way that the book was interpreted by my family and by so many others was that it was the beginning of a transition narrative.

And that narrative was put on my six-year-old niece’s very small shoulders. The small shoulders that I held later that night as she cried about how she didn’t want to be a man, she wanted to be a girl, why couldn’t she be a girl, why not? Did wearing cargo shorts mean she was going to grow a penis? I suppose to an outsider her fear would be funny, but it still turns my stomach to remember how terrified she was. She cried like I did when I came home from school realizing that liking girls that way was not okay. But I was eleven. She was six. Six, and she already knew the world wanted her to change.

The lesson my niece took away from this is that she can’t be a girl or a woman if she’s too masculine. She wants to be a girl. And so she started growing her hair longer. Pink has made its way in to her wardrobe, and impractical shoes. Nothing wrong with this - femininity is wonderful! - but this is not her choice. She buys these clothes and wears them strategically: boy clothes at home with her parents, girl clothes in public. And still there are questions. Her mother told me that their pediatrician keeps mentioning puberty blockers. MY NIECE JUST TURNED EIGHT.

This is what the whole “transgender” ideology is teaching our children. It is the new force for gender conformity. It terrifies me. And I am not going to stand silent. I am going to keep fighting for my niece and all the girls and boys and men and women like her. We do not need gender. We need to fight gender. And I will.