The Agony and the Ecstasy of Heresy
"What happened to you?" a woman I hadn’t seen in many years said to me recently. Her tone was half curiosity, half disgust.
The short answer: I had become radioactive with anger and despair.
The energy it took to straddle the space between what was often said in my liberal circles and what I knew to be true, between the world my friends and family lived in and the land I occupied — it had become unbearable. To them, I had become unbearable.
I ruined so many dinner parties. There’s always the moment when I go there, off course, and the air shifts. This is no longer fun — it’s uncomfortable for everyone. Usually it’s when someone dismisses Republicans as hatefully anti-trans, and I can’t resist lifting a finger and interpolating with a condescending-sounding “Actually…” followed by a list of what they got right. The lack of evidence of safety or efficacy for gender-affirming care. The pushback against the notion that everyone has a gender identity, and that it must be affirmed. Parents’ rights to know if their children are socially transitioning at school. The reality of biological sex — even if I bristle at banning options for what people can do to their bodies, even if I fear much of the same anti-LGBT backlash my fellow liberals do.
Soon, the air is thick with tension, and my husband slips his hand over mine to urge me to stop talking, but I get louder and angrier and rant, so that no one can bear to listen to my plea:
We’re wrong. It’s us. We’re the ones who are wrong.
* * *
Sometime in the early 2000s, I met a young Iranian man in the Salt Lake City airport, where he was working at a candy store. I had a long layover and stood at the counter, popping peanut M&Ms into my mouth while asking him about his life story.
That’s how I learned the word “apostate.”
He explained that he had converted to Christianity from Islam: an act of apostasy that is sometimes punishable by death in Iran. He’d been rescued, in some ways, both by America and by Jesus — a refugee in a Mormon refuge, a place to which many others had flocked in order to practice their faith in peace.
His tale fascinated me, the same way the trajectory of Jews for Jesus — who were at the time still regularly proselytizing in New York City’s Washington Square Park — fascinated me. Back when I’d queried Jews for Jesus about their histories, they told me that they’d changed their minds — or maybe their hearts, or some other unidentifiable internal location. They said they’d been wrong about God back when they were Jews — or “Jews for Moses”, I guess. Now, they were certain. Now they really felt the faith in their sinews, in their veins.
It was the same with my new pal in the airport: as a Muslim, he hadn’t gotten that tingling feeling of connection. Christianity — that was the ticket.
Religious faith was utterly foreign to me. We were Jewish-ish, in that my grandmother wouldn’t go to the hairdresser on Rosh Hashanah and my grandfather would joke that we’re only Jewish when they rounded up Jews in the next Nazi invasion — a joke that, since October 7th, 2023 seems so much darker, because it was laced with possibility. We weren’t religiously or even culturally connected to Judaism. We had no beliefs, no community, and no sense of culture, no history — just jokes, and a few Yiddishisms, like ongepotchket —(“too much”, as in my hippie style of dress) —and chazerai: (“junk”, usually applied to junk food, but it could refer to bad ideas, too).
The only spiritual sensation I have ever experienced came from looking up at the stars and pondering the eons it took for their light to travel to where I could see it, that they might long ago have exploded. To me, that was a deeply atheistic sense of awe, one in which doubt and unknowingness were marbled throughout. I wasn’t sure about any of it — the stars, the light, or little me standing on a hill looking up through the dark; that’s why I loved and admired it so much.
* * *
The long answer of what happened to me:
A once-good friend of mine wrote a book about trans teens early in the 2010s, and adopted a foster child who had transitioned. I read it with great interest and more or less accepted the idea of a trans child. I understood that some people wanted to change their bodies to be in between the sexes, or to leave their natal body behind and move through the world with one that is altered, to assume a new persona, even if I couldn’t relate to it personally.
Then I had a child, a daughter who, from toddlerhood, exhibited boy-typical behaviors and interests. It took me a long time to be able to say it this way, because I’d been raised hard-core feminist and took some umbrage at the idea of “boy-typical”, believing that nurture played at least as big a role, if not bigger, in one’s gender-typed behavior than nature. But she was undeniably more like the boys than the girls, regardless of our child-rearing.
I wish there had been someone around then to tell me what I now know: A kid like that is more likely to be gay or bisexual, but nobody knows, and that's fine. Let the kid wear whatever and play with whomever. It doesn’t negate her membership in her sex category.
That wasn’t how she was interpreted or understood. In my educated, progressive milieu, so many people kept suggesting she might like to be, or could be, or should be, or even was a boy. Eventually, I grew tired of defending my daughter’s right to be a boyish girl. Or — not even her right to be one: the reality that she was one. I couldn’t put together the experience we were having with the ones described in my friend’s book.
Then, in 2015, a different friend of mine made a documentary about trans teens. Most were masculine girls and feminine boys, the kinds of kids I grew up with, whose sexuality we could infer even if we didn’t articulate it. After I watched it, I said to her, “How come they all seem gay?”
I didn’t have any answers. But already I’d learned that I wasn’t supposed to ask questions.
* * *
It's not that I wasn’t raised with any sense of certainty. There were Good Democrats and Bad Republicans — that was an undeniable truth. Regular exercise was Good. Religion was Bad. Soap operas, romantic comedies, and crappy TV were wastes of time. (I still loved them, of course.) The worst kind of heresy in the extended Davis family was to not like peanut butter, the food my grandfather swore he’d request if stranded on a desert island. To reject it was an unforgivable outrage. (Naturally, my 12-year-old daughter has announced her lack of enthusiasm for it. I cannot bear to discuss it.)
I had a funny, self-assembled moral code. I thought it was fine to steal lottery tickets (a federal offense), but never understood why anybody objected to homosexuality.
It was would be many, many years — decades, really — before I realized that I operated within a belief system, too, that instead of the church, the messaging that defined my moral code was controlled by The New York Times along with other, trusted left-leaning institutions in education, medicine, media, and law., My faith was not in a higher power, but in the assumption that my side was correct — that the Left was right.
It would be many years before I realized I’d been lied to.
* * *
In 2017, I told my editor at a major news outlet what a source had told me. Cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers, the stuff of gender-affirming care for youth, was the same cocktail used to induce chemical castration as punishment or “treatment” for homosexuality; now we were using it to “liberate” trans kids. “Pharmaceutical companies are experimenting on gay kids,” a woman I'd met — a lesbian and lawyer, concerned about the disproportionate number of gay kids transitioning — had told me. It sounded like a conspiracy theory, but it also seemed possible. My editor dissuaded me from pursuing the story — I was a freelancer, they didn’t have the resources, or the pluck. I tucked it away. I turned away.
It wasn’t until 2021 that I learned about what’s known as the “desistance literature”: long-term follow-up studies of kids with what we now call gender dysphoria, or who were referred to gender clinics. The research showed that most of those kids, especially the boys, get over their distress during puberty and later identify as gay.
Why did those kids in my friend’s documentary seem gay? Probably because most of them were, and had learned to interpret their gender-nonconformity as an indication that they should transition. That was the moment of putting data to feeling, of gathering the fuel to speak up.
Each subsequent revelation felt like a gut punch. The Matthew Shepard murder wasn’t a hate crime, but it spurred an unparalleled fundraising rush, a hint to LGB and then LGBT and then LBGTQ++ advocacy groups that claiming victimhood led to cold, hard cash. These groups lied and lied about suicide risks, telling the public, parents, and kids themselves might take their own lives if trans identities were not affirmed. They said “gender-affirming care” for young people was evidence-based and life-saving.
None of it was true.
Source: Pew Research.
At age five, in the late 1970s, I moved from a hippie town in upstate New York to a college town in Georgia. My dad didn’t want us, so my mother got a job and relocated us. Soon, I’d made a friend: Kelly. Upon retrieval from our first play date, I announced that when I grew up, I wanted to be gay and marry her.
That turned out to be our only play date. Her family didn’t share my moral code.
In college, I didn’t tell anyone, including my little sister when she came to visit me, that I was dating a woman. I wasn’t sure that they thought it was as normal as I did. (They did. My sister turned out to be a lesbian.)
Then I graduated and moved to New York and was surrounded by people who all thought the same way about politics and abortion, and homosexuality. We were Right and Good, and those who disagreed were Wrong.
This wasn’t religion. Of course not. This was just… true.
And then I realized that it wasn’t.
* * *
When I was ready to correct the record, no one would let me. Neither The New York Times, nor the many trusted left-leaning institutions in education, medicine, media, and law, would allow this information to permeate the wall they’d built around their talking points. The American Academy of Pediatrics refused to amend its statement on gender-affirming care. The Southern Poverty Law Center labeled those telling the truth about the flimsy science of adolescent gender medicine as hate groups. Planned Parenthood marketed puberty blockers directly to distressed teens. The entire liberal establishment built a bulwark against the truth.
I tried every avenue I could think of. I just wanted people around me to see what I could see. If only they knew, I’d think, if only they had the information that I had, they’d change their minds. The more daylight I tried to train on the subject, the deeper in the dark my community remained.
In some ways, I wanted to flee, but I loved my people, my community, my neighborhood, and my kids’ friends’ parents. And anyway, I didn’t know where I could get refugee status, where I could be an apostate like my old pal in the Salt Lake City airport. There was no such thing as a purple state, just pockets of ferocious red and blinding blue — just extremes. And beneath all the fighting and misinformation, I thought: “How dare any of you pass these laws or make these claims in the name of a kid like mine?”
Around me, people bowed to what had come to seem to me a religious idea: gender identity, the sparkling gendered soul, independent of the body. They proselytized in op-eds and in school curricula. They believed that by speaking a name or pronoun aloud, reality would change. It was spell-casting. They’d become cultural sorcerers, except because of the spell, they thought I was the witch. I was the town lunatic, sequestered in my gender atheism.
I wrote to the Freedom from Religion Society, to which my stepfather belonged. “Gender identity is a religious belief,” I explained. “I’m being forced to accept it like the body of Christ, like gender wafers.” They did not respond.
This was chazerai. Everyone was lapping it up.
* * *
Invitations thinned out. I was off the annual Christmas party list, the New Year’s Day comfy pants party, the regular group hangs. It was convenient for me to assert that the rejection was based on my beliefs, but it was just as much about my personality. Always difficult, I had become unbearable to my own people. I often got in fights — over text, over drinks, at the beach.
I admit that I could not stop talking about it. It felt like an emergency all the time. “Have you ever heard the term monomaniacal?” someone asked me once. My sense of humor dried up, withering into desiccated rants and tirades where the jokes used to be. I was that lady at the school picnic, at the after-work drinks, at the funeral — yes, at the funeral — intoning endlessly about the lie of gender identity and the contested psychological intervention of social transition. That lady. The one people gossip about later. My fixation gave me the rare ability to make the scandal of the century into a bore.
My people couldn’t hear it from me, with my anger and my insecurity and my ferocity and my despair. How could I feel so much love for and interest in the Iranian Christian apostate in Salt Lake City, so curious about his experience that intersected zero percent with mine? So few in my community feel that for me, and I feel it for so few in my community.
Then, at the end of 2024, at the end of four years of non-stop trying, came the return of Trump. For a moment, just a moment, a few liberals wondered: Have we gone too far with gender identity, with males in women’s sports, with translating misgendering into harassment, with compelled pronouns? Then, at the beginning of 2025, came the slew of executive orders on sex and gender — some reasonable and necessary, others tilting into cruelty — and the Overton window slammed shut again, the narrative of non-stop victimization returned.
I had, then, another thought, the darkest thought: What if I’d committed myself to this subject not just as ablutions for my sin of complicity, or in the name of my kid, but because it ensured rejection — a theme established in my childhood, with my father, with that little girl Kelly after our only play date. I had always been a master at arranging to be rejected. I have a PhD in self-sabotage. What if, this whole time, I’ve been chasing not just the truth, but the shame? What if heresy confirmed my darkest belief about myself, as unlovable and unworthy?
I shook that conviction away. I transformed it. Maybe there was strength hidden in the revelation of rejection. Maybe I could, for once in my life, feel power in the conviction of my beliefs.
I’ve met so many wonderful, weird, and supportive people along my path of apostasy. I love the amalgam of people I’ve met down here in the gender rabbit hole, from Christian conservatives to transsexual libertarians to disaffected liberals. I am doing everything I can not to replicate the orthodoxy I came from, blinded by certainty, overly trusting of people simply because they’re in the same community.
At first, it was terrifying, moving through the world without an absolutist belief system. without knowing whom or what to trust. I was learning to walk again, all the guideposts and guardrails I’d known now covered in barbed wire. I’m determined to keep walking in the direction of the truth, even if I never get there.
Published June 15, 2025
Published in Issue XIII: Heretic
