Hey Mark. I’m so bad this stuff that I’m not even sure if I’m responding to you in the right place, but it’s a fair question. For me, the most specific action I’ve been able to take is to suppress my natural inclination to tell other folks what to do.

I’ll tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, I was speaking to my niece Julia. At the time she was fifteen. I asked her for a demographic breakdown of her suburban Maryland, public high school. Without hesitation she rattled off some stats on racial diversity, the number of first-gen immigrants, religious affiliation as best as she could tell. Then she noted that it’s harder to determine economic class, counterintuitively because of how important it is: She said that even the kids who were presumably poor “front” to be affluent for fear of losing their place in a social hierarchy. Yeah, the kid was fifteen. Amazing, right?

Then she thought for a minute and said, “I’d guess that about half of my friends identify as non-binary.”

I knew what she meant. It was clear this was an issue of gender-identity and sexuality. But I’d never before even heard the term. I was taken back not by the ease with which she described the gender-demographics and sexuality-demographics of her school, but by the fact that her cohort possessed an entire interior lexicon that simply didn’t exist when I was her age. When I was kid, you were straight or gay. Then there was this other thing called “bi,” but that was probably gay, too, right?

The reality — or much closer to the reality, anyway — of the situation is that those aspects of human identity have always been more fluid than my generation was capable of understanding. Julia and her peeps just get it. So, rather than getting into an argument with her about non-gendered pronouns or making fun of her for referring to individual friends as “they/them,” the best thing for me to do is keep quiet and learn. Be prepared to be led into a world that is far more complex than the one that we imagined.

There’s a thousand more things, of course, that can be done in the public sphere as far as civic engagement, but my experience suggests that the more profound shifts in behavior come from being open to the world as defined by these kids.

I hope that makes some sense and I thank you for taking the time to read and comment on the essay.

Abrazos,
Mike