Stories do change us

This might be one of my #1 public policy issues: As a human right, every single kid needs to be exposed to a wide range of diverse examples of people who thrive in all sorts of different ways. People of all different geographies and neurologies and physical shapes and abilities and ethnicities and gender identities and sexualities and careers and partnered statuses and a whole bunch of other ways humans are different. We don't know who will connect with what examples, but seeing a giant range of ways to thrive and helping kids imagine that just because of where you start, there are lots of "where you can go"s is absolutely life-saving. If we allow any parent on the planet to opt their kid out of exposure to stories about diverse models of thriving, we are complicit in child abuse.

I'd argue the book banners who want to prevent this are partially correct: stories DO make someone queer. But the alternative isn’t “straight”; it’s hopeless or perhaps dead. Make the book banners say it out loud: to deny queer kids stories about queer thriving is to say they would rather said kids be hopeless or dead than thriving as queer people.

Cis kids need to learn about trans people too, but wow, I *really* needed more examples of trans people much much earlier in my life.

We queer folx never had a chance of succeeding at being straight, but in an urgent way, exposure to stories and roles DOES change who we are. It changes us from dysfunctional, hopeless people doomed to fail in an attempt to conform to a hegemonic norm we can never successfully fit into people with hope because there are other models of success that are actually congruent with our core identites.

Self awareness *does* create an existential difference between a ugly ducklings and swans. Just because I wasn't successful at being straight, I wasn't queer yet. I was just hopeless. Exposure to another archetype of success changes people -- changed me -- from a hopeless doomed failure of a straight person into a queer person with hope. Stories changed me from a hopeless doomed miserable cis person to a trans person with hope (I mean I'm still terrified and far from thriving as a trans person, but having other stories to hope for makes living possible).