In Self-Defense of Our Children (generated with ChatGPT5.5)

This week I spent an hour on the cold ground in the rain under a tarp with my injured ten-year-old daughter waiting for an ambulance.

There are moments in life when time stops behaving like time. It stretches, thickens, turns animal. You are not thinking in paragraphs or politics or theories. You are counting breaths. You are watching your child’s face. You are listening for sirens. You are trying to keep your voice steady because your child is frightened and in pain and your fear is a luxury you cannot afford. You are cold, wet, aching, helpless, and absolutely present.

That is care.

Not as a slogan. Not as a policy document. Not as a sentimental word politicians put in their mouths when they need to sound human for thirty seconds before returning to the machinery of cruelty. Real care. Ground-level care. Body-to-body care. The kind where you do not abandon the vulnerable because they are inconvenient. The kind where you do not walk away because the weather is bad. The kind where another human being’s pain becomes non-negotiable.

And that, I think, is where my politics comes from.

Not from theory first. Not from ideology first. Not from some adolescent fantasy of revolution. It comes from the cold ground. It comes from the rain. It comes from children in pain. It comes from the absolute moral fact that no child is disposable.

No child.

Not my child. Not your child. Not the awkward kid. Not the queer kid. Not the trans kid. Not the nonbinary kid. Not the autistic kid. Not the poor kid. Not the brown kid. Not the angry kid. Not the kid who self-harms. Not the kid who has already learned to speak in whispers because adults keep punishing them for existing too loudly.

None of them.

And yet we live under systems that behave as if some children are disposable. We live under economic and political orders that treat the vulnerable as acceptable collateral damage in someone else’s culture war. We are told that this is prudence, or common sense, or parental rights, or biological reality, or fiscal responsibility, or democracy. We are told to remain calm while powerful adults draw targets on children’s backs and then act wounded when we object to the crosshairs.

Let us be clear. When governments attack gender-diverse people, especially those under twenty-five, they are not engaging in an abstract debate about language. They are intervening in the lives of young people who are already living through a youth mental health crisis: depression, anxiety, self-harm, alienation, suicidal despair, social isolation, family rejection, school bullying, housing insecurity, and the daily low-grade terror of being made into a public argument.

To turn those children into political theatre is obscene.

To use them as bait for reactionary votes is obscene.

To tell them, directly or indirectly, that their identities are suspect, their bodies are problems, their futures are negotiable, and their dignity is conditional on the comfort of adults who will never have to live a day in their skin — that is not governance. That is violence wearing a suit.

And yes, I use the word violence carefully.

I am not talking about disagreement. I am not talking about hurt feelings. I am not talking about the ordinary discomfort of pluralism, where people in a society must learn to live with differences they do not fully understand. I am talking about the use of institutional power to restrict, shame, erase, discipline, expose, and endanger a vulnerable minority. I am talking about the kind of violence that does not need to throw a punch because it has forms, bills, policies, definitions, eligibility criteria, funding cuts, media campaigns, school rules, bathrooms, passports, medical gatekeeping, and bureaucratic delay.

The state rarely needs to raise its fist. It has paperwork.

And paperwork can kill.

Anyone who has dealt with institutions while vulnerable knows this. The cruelty is often not dramatic. It is grey. It is procedural. It is the letter that arrives. It is the appointment that never comes. It is the box you cannot tick. It is the name that will not be used. It is the gender marker they want to revoke. It is the service that disappears. It is the professional who speaks about you as if you are a problem to be managed rather than a person to be met. It is the careful, polite, well-formatted removal of your safety.

And after all that, they ask why we are angry.

They attack our children and then lecture us on tone.

They make our young people afraid and then accuse us of being divisive.

They legislate humiliation and then call our resistance extremism.

They define people out of public life and then pretend we are the ones obsessed with identity.

No. I did not draw first blood.

If the future wants to paint me as someone who wanted to start a class war, my answer will be simple: I did not draw first blood.

The first blood was drawn every time a young person was told that their suffering was less important than an adult’s ideology. The first blood was drawn every time the powerful decided that trans and gender-diverse youth could be used as sacrificial offerings to the gods of resentment. The first blood was drawn every time a government chose cruelty because cruelty polls well among frightened people who have been trained to punch sideways and downward instead of upward.

And that is where class enters this. Because make no mistake: this is class politics.

The same people who tell us that gender-diverse youth are the great threat to civilization are usually very quiet about child poverty, unaffordable housing, collapsing mental health services, exhausted teachers, burnt-out nurses, underpaid carers, precarious work, obscene wealth accumulation, ecological breakdown, and the slow privatization of everything that keeps ordinary people alive.

They would rather have you frightened of a trans teenager than angry at a landlord.

They would rather have you obsess over bathrooms than ask why children are hungry.

They would rather have you panic about pronouns than notice who owns the country.

They would rather have you believe that civilization is threatened by a young person changing their name than by billionaires, corporate capture, austerity, institutional neglect, and the deliberate grinding down of public care.

That is the oldest trick in the book: divide the wounded so they do not recognize the boot.

And our capitalist overlords — yes, I said it — know exactly what they are doing. Their political lackeys know too. They know that a frightened public is easier to govern than a compassionate one. They know that exhausted parents, overworked carers, isolated young people, indebted students, precarious workers, and the chronically stressed are easier to manipulate when given a scapegoat. They know that people who are hurting can be made to hurt others if their pain is misdirected with enough repetition.

This is why the attack on gender-diverse people is never just about gender. It is about control. It is about hierarchy. It is about restoring obedience. It is about teaching everyone, not just queer and trans people, that the state may define the limits of your reality and punish you if you refuse.

It says: know your place.

It says: accept the categories we give you.

It says: do not become too complex.

It says: do not ask for care.

It says: do not expect the world to make room for you.

It says: some lives are too inconvenient to protect.

And my answer is: no.

No masters. No billionaires. No bureaucratic cruelty. No corporate priesthood. No state worship. Feed people. House people. Care for people. Let communities breathe.

That is not extremism. That is civilization.

What is extremist is telling a generation of young people that their lives are negotiable. What is extremist is building an economy that consumes families and then blaming children for breaking. What is extremist is watching youth mental health collapse and deciding that the real priority is to make life harder for the kids already most at risk. What is extremist is acting as if compassion is a luxury item to be rationed by people who have never had to beg an institution to recognize their humanity.

I am tired of the reasonable voice that is expected from the wounded.

I am tired of the sensible paragraph written after the knife has already gone in.

I am tired of pretending that cruelty becomes less cruel when it comes with a press release.

There is a point where care must grow teeth.

Not because we love violence. Not because we want chaos. Not because we want revenge. But because care without boundaries becomes servitude. Compassion without resistance becomes complicity. Love that cannot say “no further” is not love; it is decoration.

When a child is lying in the rain, you do not convene a committee to debate whether their pain is ideologically convenient. You cover them. You stay. You call for help. You keep them warm. You refuse to abandon them.

That is the whole ethic.

That is the whole politics.

Our children are lying in the rain.

Some literally. Many spiritually. Many psychologically. Many socially. Many in bedrooms at night with phones glowing in their hands, reading adults debate whether they are real, whether they are dangerous, whether they are confused, whether they should be allowed care, whether their names count, whether their bodies belong to them, whether their futures are worth protecting.

Imagine being a young person already fighting to stay alive and realizing that your government has decided your existence is a wedge issue.

Imagine the cold of that.

Imagine the rain.

Now imagine being told that the compassionate response is to stay polite.

No.

I will not be polite about the abandonment of children.

I will not be neutral about policies that make vulnerable young people less safe.

I will not pretend that this is merely a difference of opinion when one side is trying to live and the other side is trying to legislate the terms under which that life may be recognized.

I will not accept a politics that treats care as weakness and cruelty as realism.

I will not worship the state. I will not worship the market. I will not worship the family as an institution when actual living children inside actual families are being sacrificed to preserve some brittle fantasy of order. I will not bow to the corporate priesthood, the bureaucratic gatekeepers, the parliamentary opportunists, or the professional managers of human misery.

I choose the child in the rain.

Every time.

This does not mean we do not need wisdom. Of course we do. Care must be thoughtful. Medicine must be careful. Families need support. Schools need resources. Young people need good information, safe adults, peer connection, housing security, mental health care, and room to grow. Not every question has a simple answer. Not every young person needs the same thing. Human beings are complex, and care worthy of the name must be attentive to complexity.

But complexity is not an excuse for cruelty.

Caution is not the same as abandonment.

Safeguarding is not the same as erasure.

And “protecting children” does not mean protecting adults from the discomfort of children who do not conform.

A society that truly cared about children would not begin with suspicion. It would begin with listening. It would fund mental health services properly. It would support families without coercion. It would train teachers and clinicians with humility. It would make schools safer. It would reduce poverty. It would house people. It would feed people. It would stop making parents choose between work and care. It would stop turning every vulnerable minority into a battlefield for electoral gain.

It would ask: what helps this young person live?

That is the question.

Not: how do we make them normal?

Not: how do we make them disappear?

Not: how do we reassure the frightened majority that nothing has to change?

What helps this young person live?

Everything else is noise.

So yes, I feel revolutionary fervor. I feel it in my bones. I feel it as a parent, as a nonbinary person, as a former academic, as a mental health worker, as someone who nearly became a nurse and then found myself nursing at home anyway. I feel it as someone who has watched institution after institution reveal that it will protect its own machinery before it protects the living beings caught inside it.

But my revolution is not a fantasy of fire for fire’s sake.

My revolution is a blanket over a child in the rain.

My revolution is a warm house.

My revolution is a school where queer kids are not hunted by policy.

My revolution is a health system that does not make people prove they deserve care.

My revolution is a society where no billionaire’s comfort matters more than a child’s survival.

My revolution is a parent saying: you do not get to use our children as kindling.

And if that sounds dangerous to the people who profit from fear, good.

Care is dangerous to empires.

Love is dangerous to systems built on disposability.

A child who knows they are not disposable is dangerous to every hierarchy that depends on shame.

A community that refuses to abandon its vulnerable is dangerous to every government that governs by neglect.

So let them clutch their pearls. Let them call us radicals. Let them pretend that the real threat is the anger of those defending children, not the cold machinery that made defense necessary.

I know what side I am on.

I am on the side of the child in the rain.

I am on the side of the young person who wants to live long enough to become themselves.

I am on the side of the parents, carers, teachers, nurses, counsellors, friends, aunties, uncles, elders, weirdos, queers, misfits, and grey wolves who stand between vulnerable children and the systems that would grind them down.

I am on the side of the disposable who are not disposable.

And when history asks why I raised my voice, why I refused civility, why I would not let the powerful define compassion as compliance, I will answer plainly:

I did not draw first blood.

I saw children bleeding.

And I chose care with teeth.