There are moments when I simply have to put a story down and come back to it at another time. It seems in the estimation of our illustrious governor that I and my colleagues are regularly committing crimes against humanity. At least that was the implication of his latest letter.

I have to suspend disbelief for a moment and dedicate mental bandwidth to something that doesn’t deserve it. Essentially, the thought process is that children do not have the mental capacity to determine that they want to become a boy or girl. Therefore, a parent has to consent to any procedures that they may have.

If we further suspend disbelief we would have to come out and say what all of this means. It means that being transgender is a crime. So, what the governor expects us to do is to call Child Protective Services and tell them about the transgender students in our school.

This includes students that have nearly completed their transition and students in the beginning of the transitioning process. It assumes a world view where kids (or parents) wake up one day and just think, “I’d like to be a girl today.” Maybe dad was tired of watching John come in seventh at his track meet every week, so we’ll make John Jennifer and she will win the blue ribbons we’ve been expecting.

It ignores the truth about the transgender experience. It trivializes the transgender experience. I wouldn’t even begin to speak for anyone on this regard, but I can’t imagine it would be easy. It certainly isn’t something you dream up on a Tuesday and then go have the surgery on Thursday. It’s a difficult and painful process.

You spend more than ten years developing an identity of your child in your own mind and experience. You see them as a boy or girl. That identity comes with certain assumed experiences and they tell you they don’t see themselves the way you see them. It ignores the grief that must come when a parent comes to grips with the fact that their child needs to go through this transition to be happy. Your conception of them must die and rise up out of the ashes as something different.

So, what the governor and his cronies want us to do is to tell a government agency that what they’ve just done is a crime. We are supposed to report that student because their parents obviously don’t know what’s best for their child. We are calling another human being a crime. In case that didn’t sink in, it needs to be repeated. We are calling another human being a crime.

I hope I don’t have to spell this out, but I’m not doing that. Even if I for one second believed that being transgender was wrong or even somehow a sin against God, I wouldn’t dream of telling a kid that. Doing so would be absolutely cruel and would be antithetical to everything we should be about as human beings.

Of course, when we stop suspending disbelief we start to understand what this is really about. It’s about scoring cheap political points with a base that doesn’t need it. They don’t need their ego massaged. They don’t need to feel better about their bigotry. These kids deserve the love, respect, and kindness that Abbott is showing to his base. I’m sorry that they feel uncomfortable with the idea of transgender people. I don’t say this lightly, but they can go to hell if they think I’m about rat out a transgender kid just to make them feel better.