What our discomfort with shifting gender identities might actually reveal.
We live in a society that valorizes individual freedom and lionizes those who march to their own drum. One of our most famous poems is about two roads that go in different directions, and the poet's happiness at having taken the less trodden path. As Old Blue Eyes famously sang, "Regrets, I've had a few/But then again, too few to mention." We are a carpe diem society, regrets be damned. |
And so I have been grappling for some time with this question: Why are we so obsessed with the potential of one particular regret? Why are we so afraid that children will undergo a gender transition and someday wish they hadn't? Studies have shown that regret rates for medical transition are incredibly low, and that it is very rare for people to transition back to their sex assigned at birth. |
In my latest column for Times Opinion, I dig into the emotional and philosophical underpinnings of these fears. |
What was supposed to be an exploration of regret ended up being something else: a deep and very personal exploration of how we end up with the identities we hold, how they shape us and, crucially, how we ultimately can and must shape them in return. |
It is a long and discursive read that takes some twists and turns, but I hope you'll stay with it and maybe think a little bit differently about how you came to be who you are, and just how malleable so many of our seemingly fixed, binary identities are. I argue that perhaps we should all wear our identities a little bit more lightly, with an openness to the many ways they can change over the course of our lifetimes. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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