Last winter, my youngest daughter caught pneumonia. It was “walking pneumonia,” which I think just means “pneumonia that’s mild enough that you can still walk around with it.” She was definitely still walking around, but her cough was otherworldy. She sounded like she was growling. I hate seeing my babies suffer.
We were sent to the children’s hospital for an X-ray to confirm the diagnosis, and when we walked into the radiology department, the woman at the front desk said she had to ask the “Covid questions.” (This was November of 2023. One more time for emphasis: 2023).
So she asked if we’d traveled out of the country recently. If we’d been around anyone with a confirmed case of Covid. Then she asked if my daughter had had a fever recently, or any “respiratory symptoms.” I said, ma’am, we are here because her doctor thinks she has pneumonia. Are you suggesting that if I say “yes, she has indeed had a fever and respiratory symptoms,” that you will tell us we have to go home? Yes, she said, that is the protocol. She shrugged a little bit, which at least indicated that she understood the utter irrationality of what she was saying, but the shrug was the most she could muster. I responded, “ok, no. She is not having any respiratory symptoms,” but I said it in the slow-talking cadence of a preschool teacher, because I couldn’t help myself, because that felt like the only human way to endure this interaction. She sighed a huge sigh of relief and told us to have a seat while we waited for the X-ray tech.
I want to write about making little decisions that really aren’t “decisions” at all, in that there is no rational alternative, and how this is probably the only way out of the stupid situation we’re in right now, culturally speaking. But I recognize the irony in starting this entreaty with a story of the time I didn’t really do the courageous thing, although I just don’t know what it would have even been in this case. To lie and get sent home? To chain myself to the X-ray machine until the hospital CEO had to come get me? To file a complaint afterwards? Maybe.
A couple months ago I heard an interview with a woman whose husband spent several years in a Czech prison in the 1980s because he wouldn’t pledge allegiance to the Communist Party. Their saga started with really a remarkably small thing: their housing community was told to put little Party flags up in their windows to “celebrate” the revolution, and they said no. No little flags for us, please, we don’t think this is cause for celebration. Her husband lost his job and went to prison for a while. She read Tolkein to her kids on contraband manuscripts because she thought maybe Mordor could give them a word for the world they were currently living in.
The flags were a non-decision. In so many cases, you can ask a person who appears to have done something really courageous and heroic and course-changing - you can ask them, after the fact, “what gave you the strength to do it?!” and they’ll say something like “I don’t, know, I just did it.” I don’t think that’s always false humility. I think sometimes some decisions are just so uncomplicated and rational that the alternative doesn’t even occur to people. Put these flags in the window? When the pathetic death cult they represent is utterly pillaging every good and decent and beautiful thing about life in this world right in front of me?
Obviously there is courage here, especially when we are aware of the stakes. Especially as the deluded gatekeepers make good on their threats and throw your husband in jail and life gets objectively harder. But it’s also a kind of gift when “courage” starts to mean not much more than “refusing to engage a delusion.” Like, it would be one thing if Christian courage today meant having a convincing and elegantly simple explanation of the Trinity in 10 words or less. Just saying “boys are boys, and cannot be girls”? Not so complicated.
About a month ago, I was back at the children’s hospital with my other daughter for a consultation with a specialist. A nurse practitioner came in the room before our appointment to take her vitals and check us in. She said that now that my daughter had turned 8, it was hospital protocol to ask her a series of standard questions. The way the nurse said this pricked my ears. She was timid. On instinct, I said I’d like to see the questions first, before she said them out loud. They were, as suspected, bonkers. “Have you ever been in a sexual relationships that made you feel violated?” “Has anyone ever made you feel sexually unsafe?”
I told the woman that not only would my 8-year-old fail to understand a good 80 percent of the words used in those questions (who the hell WROTE these?), but that in no way did she have my permission to say them out loud to her, and that I will go ahead right now and tell you the answer to all of these is “no,” and that she should move right along to the stuff we are actually here for - the blood pressure, the heart rate, the stuff this nurse presumably went to school to learn how to do.
The nurse agreed immediately, sheepishly, and this reaction made me feel even angrier. She didn’t want to ask these questions either. Medical professionals at a children’s hospital are arguably in a position to recognize signs of abuse in children, and should absolutely respond accordingly when they do. But bureaucratizing this good intention into oblivion by making 8 years old the Official Age and removing the tiniest sliver of an opening for actual humans to make simple judgment calls in the actual room - does this seem like a situation in which I need to ask these questions? - is just, bad. It’s dumb. Someone somewhere with some academic title who sits in a patient-less room on the 10th floor of that hospital wrote this policy, and the people tasked with implementing it know just as well as I do how backwards and gross it is.
I’ve encountered other situations like this and done the cowardly thing. My dentist’s office asks for my “pronouns.” I leave that part of the form blank (you’re gonna have to go with your gut, Dr. Tallman!) but I haven’t said anything about it. I haven’t said “Dr. Tallman, before I entrust you with my orthodontic health, it is actually important to me that you confirm you know the difference between male and female.” Because he is a medical professional, and he does indeed know the difference, but I have a legitimate vested interest in whether he’s willing to say it out loud. But I’ve stayed quiet, because I’m cowardly, and because like so many of us, my main social goal on any given day is really just not making too much noise. When your kid is absolutely melting into a rage tornado on an airplane, who wouldn’t do whatever they have to do - candy, bribing, singing like an idiot - to get them to be quiet?
What I’m trying to say is that I suspect that just like that nurse practitioner at the Children’s hospital, *most* people are not actually deluded. Most of the people checking you in to the doctor’s office or ringing up your groceries or processing your insurance claim or grading your first-grader’s spelling test know men can’t be women. They know we shouldn’t be talking to kids about “healthy sexuality.” They know that some amorphous monster we call “climate change” isn’t going to magically obliterate their houses and possessions and bodies at some precise moment less than five years from now, like some Neil DeGrasse Tyson-endorsed version of the Rapture. They’re just afraid of the noise. They just want to give the one screaming kid, the one Policy-Writer in the Big Office who is doing all the yelling and stomping - a piece of candy so they’ll shut up. Maybe these professionals need other people - the people on the receiving end of the policies - to make the small, uncomplicated decisions for them.
Maybe the next time a doctor’s office asks me for “pronouns” or wants to talk to my 8-year-old about “sexual consent” I should react rationally. Have you ever attempted to strike up a conversation with someone who ends up not being an English-speaker? You’re like “hi, how are you today?” and they just kind of look at you, brow furrowed? That’s how I want to respond in these situations. “Ma’am, what are your pronouns?” “I’m sorry, what? What does that even mean?” Make them say it out loud. Make them commit. I’m willing to best most of them will respond like the nurse practitioner - sheepishly. Of course Mrs. Baer, nevermind, absolutely.
Cultural winds are a numbers game, and if enough people make enough little decisions, eventually the delusions will fade. Everyone is safer, and life is always better, when the majority of us are willing to publicly acknowledge reality.