Every one of us has stood in a room where the truth needed saying and said nothing.
We told ourselves it was not our place. We told ourselves someone else would speak. We studied our own shoes while another person was left to stand alone. I want to write about what that silence costs — and I want to write about it through the child our moment has made it most acceptable to abandon.
Eileen Monte
I was that child once. Not a transgender child in the language we use now; that word was not available to me. I was simply a child who understood, quietly and early, that who I was did not match what the world had decided I should be. And I did what such children almost always do. I went silent.
Not because silence was safe, but because no one ever showed me it was safe to speak. That silence was not peace. It was a slow theft — the ache, the isolation, the dark thoughts of a child pressing her face to the window of a feast she had been made for, wondering why she was not let in.
“Why would anyone risk everything — family, safety, faith, home — to walk through the particular hell I walked through?”
People treat it as a choice. I have spent a lifetime answering that, and my answer is plain: No. Why would anyone risk everything — family, safety, faith, home — to walk through the particular hell I walked through, only to arrive, exhausted and grateful, on the other side? No one chooses that fire. What people choose is silence. And silence, when a child is standing alone in it, is not neutral. It is a verdict.
Fear, dressed as protection
Into that silence, in our time, step people with microphones and pulpits and campaign budgets. They have learned that fear sells — that a frightened crowd will vote, will donate, will applaud. So they take a child, a real child struggling to understand who they are, and they turn that child into a threat. They call it protecting the family.
The prophet Isaiah has a phrase for this: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” I did not write that. It has been waiting on the page for 3,000 years, and it is difficult to read it now without a particular kind of chill.
I am not asking anyone to take my word for the politics. I am asking only that we notice what is in front of us.
This year, in Texas, the attorney general announced a settlement forcing the state’s largest children’s hospital to open the nation’s first “detransition clinic,” calling it a monumental day in a fight to stop a movement. Hear that word again: a movement. Not a child. Not a family at a kitchen table, frightened and praying. A movement, to be stopped.
“I am asking only that we notice what is in front of us.”
The hospital, in its own defense, said the case against it was built on falsehoods and distractions and every review found it had followed the law. And the settlement was released while its author was campaigning for higher office, trailing in the polls.
I spent years being paid to weigh evidence and to notice when the timing of an accusation matters. I only ask the reader to notice it too.
Let me also say what the science actually says, because it is not what the campaign ads say. Gender dysphoria is real, recognized in every major medical diagnostic manual, and rare — a small population, a fraction of a fraction. The children living it are not a movement. They are a handful of frightened kids and their families.
The real clinical conversation about them is not reckless; it is slow, careful, individualized, built on assessment and family and time.
The reckless thing — the thing the evidence actually links to harm — is the hostility itself. Bullying and punitive laws are tied to worse depression, worse anxiety and more thoughts of death in these children. The cruelty is not protecting them. It is measurably hurting them.
What the fear built
I know what that fear builds, because I lived inside what it built. For decades I lived underground in my own life, because the loudest voices told me who I was made me dangerous, disordered, damned. I believed them — because no one stood beside me and said otherwise. There was no strong voice in the room. Only the crowd, and the crowd’s silence, and my own.
“The harm was not done only by the cruel. It was done by the kind people who said nothing.”
This is the part I most want people of faith to hear. The harm was not done only by the cruel. It was done by the kind people who said nothing. The ones who did not hate me, who would have called themselves decent, who simply did not want the cost of speaking. Their silence was not innocent. It built the same walls the shouting did.
The seat that always was yours
There is a story Jesus tells about a great banquet. The host prepares a feast and the invited guests all make their excuses. So the host does something the respectable crowd never would do. He sends his servants into the streets and the alleys and says: “Bring in the ones who were left out. The overlooked. The pushed-aside. Fill my table with exactly the people the world did not think belonged.”
I know what it is to stand outside that banquet. For most of my life I was not welcome — an outcast, or so I was taught to believe. And here is the part that took me longest to forgive: I believed it. I kept myself out. I looked at the lit windows and thought, not for me. They had convinced me, and so I did their work for them. I was my own closed door.
Standing for the truth is the most liberating thing this world offers, and the loneliest. When you stand beside someone pinned beneath fabricated evidence, when you refuse the comfortable lie, you often stand alone. You feel like a fool. You feel cast out by the very people you hoped would stand with you.
But underneath the loneliness you know something they have chosen not to know: The evidence is real, medical and scientific and biblical, mountains of it. And people are not blind to the truth. They are looking away from it, because looking would cost them their comfort.
So I will leave the reader with the question I most want the church to sit with. There is a seat at the table that always was meant for that child. It has been empty a long time. Who among us will pull it out and say the words no one said to me in time: “Come in! You belong here. The table always was yours.”
Eileen Monte is a transgender woman writing from Fort Worth, Texas. She seeks to take on the political machine working to legislate trans people out of public life and the inherited fear it runs on. She is not a historian or a member of the clergy. Just a person of deep thoughts, stubborn convictions, and five kids who keep her honest.
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