The story opens with her divorce and her child “coming out” as transgender; both lives are rebuilt over the course of the book, around M’s transness. But the only question she receives about the all-encompassing nature of this project is from a man she is dating, who asks her: “You’re so into this transgender thing… It’s your daughter who’s transgender, right?”
Instead of hearing this as a question about her embrace of the trans-rights fandom, though, Mack interprets this as him asking if she is in fact transgender. She dismisses this as absurd and offensive and dumps him. There’s no question of making space within the world she’s constructing for the possibility that it has an outside.
But it does have an outside. I, for example, do not believe all the evil in the world can be cured by maternal love, or indeed that humans can change sex. How To Be A Girl meant, for me, stepping out of the gender-critical filter bubble into the world as it appears to a woman who has staked not just her own identity and social world but literally her child’s body on believing gender identity is real. Doing so was like visiting the Upside Down.
Mack and I share numerous reference points on the topic of transgender rights, but are familiar with radically opposing interpretations of them. She takes at face value the (debunked among gender-critical feminists) statistic about the high risk of suicide among trans children, for example, while treating as debunked the study, widely cited in gender-critical circles, about the high percentage of trans children who desist if left alone.
Elsewhere she curates stories in a way that’s a photographic negative of the one I’m accustomed to. She notes, for example, that the pioneer of “watchful waiting” in gender-identity treatment, Kenneth Zucker, was “fired” from the clinic he ran, and the clinic itself “shut down pending an investigation of its practices”. Move the picture, though, and the optical illusion changes. Zucker was eventually paid $586,000 in damages after it was ruled that he was wrongfully dismissed; the question is whether that gets reported.
Similarly, in her discussion of America’s “bathroom bill” court cases, she states that there “wasn’t any evidence” that “men posing as transgender women were infiltrating changing rooms”. But step into the other fandom, and you’ll soon hear about the evidence.
In the online battles over which facts to curate, it’s easy to forget that what’s at stake is real people, with real lives, and — as is clearly the case with Marlo Mack — real love for a real child. But this doesn’t make the escalating contest between incompatible fandoms less intense. Quite the opposite. For if there’s a common theme to the bitterest online disputes, it’s they’re rooted in questions that, somewhere at least, someone is willing to stake living bodies on.
It’s perhaps telling that Mack’s story ends with M aged 13. Transition has, up to that point, only resisted social norms; the reader is spared the far more gruelling and invasive fight against biological ones. But the blocker is inserted, and the book ends with M “excited to be growing up”. And speaking of M’s participation in a long-term study on trans kids, Mack rejoices that “Our kids would be part of a historic cohort”.
Move the picture, though, and the image changes: another way of saying this might be “conducting medical experiments on children without a control group”. Regardless, Mack is willing to stake her child’s body on her convictions — and in a post-Christian culture desperately searching for meanings, it’s no wonder competing online communities of belief take shape around such certainty. And this in turn forces us to confront the fact that disputes with real stakes in real bodies aren’t like arguments over fictional fandoms. Some battles between filter bubbles really are zero-sum.
You can read books that say reality should be re-ordered to accommodate children like M, and others that say humans can’t change sex. If it doesn’t affect you, you can murmur about the “marketplace of ideas”. But which fandom sets the rules for life in the material world is a political question, and on matters that affect the wider legal or cultural framework, there is nowhere neutral to stand.
Mack is willing to swim against the tide of biology, transform an entire legal system, hammer other people’s use of language into new shapes, for the sake of her child. And as she recounts the role her struggle plays in her own identity, as well as M’s, it’s increasingly clear that succeeding is an existential matter for both of them. This is emotive enough when what’s at stake is children’s wellbeing. But when it’s the life and death of an entire nation, everything intensifies again: the appeal of joining one or another fandom, the impossibility of neutrality, and the incapacity to think long-term about wider material consequences.
As we sidle along the edge of nuclear precipice, in the world’s first very online viral war, it’s increasingly clear how easy it is to slide from mutually antagonistic online bubbles powered by love and good intentions, to a world where people call for actual real-world Armageddon on the basis of internet-powered belief. If I have any hope at all of averting catastrophe, it lies in perhaps the most powerful force there is, a force I still have in common with Marlo Mack, despite our radically competing worldviews: we love our children.
As How To Be A Girl amply illustrates, this can be turned to many uses. Loving parents determined to reorder reality around their adored child may drive radical changes across the social, legal and political fabric while ignoring serious knock-on effects elsewhere. But the love we have for our children is also the beginning of life in common.
Anyone raising children needs a community. Most mothers, when they become mothers, set about building one. We can only hope that this need we still have for one another is enough to keep our fraying public life from total conflagration — or, if the worst comes to the worst, to rebuild it from the ashes.
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