From the Archives VIII

Burning down the house

Miss Miller, 2011—beautifully, genuinely, pre-politically herself.

December 16, 2023

The following is from near the beginning of my transformation from Democrat to Independent, from happily married to terrified that my marriage was doomed. It all started with two sentences uttered…

September 14, 2022

We never used to disagree on much. I think he’s messy. He thinks I spend too much. We’re both right. But now, Mr. Miller disagrees with me on a fundamental level that neither of us has experienced until now. For instance, he does not sign his name to the most recent letter I’ve written to Miss Miller’s teachers, principal and school board.

“Teachers have it hard enough,” he says when I show him the letter on my laptop. “If I were them, I’d toss it in the garbage.”

He feels sympathy for Miss Miller’s teachers and none for my position—what I thought was our position. It’s a slap in the face. A knife in the gut. A betrayal. More knives will come. He’ll say things like, Jamie Reed just wants attention. Larry Elder is problematic. James Lindsay is alt-right. And ultimately, Trump is a worse threat to democracy than anything on the left. It will surprise me to experience his utter refusal to entertain my sources. It will enrage and finally teach me to not rely on him anymore for emotional support or validation. But more than anything, it confuses me. Miss Miller is his daughter too. He knows she’s not trans, or even gender dysphoric. He hates the pronoun thing. He knows this is all bullshit.

But Mr. Miller thinks I’m asking for special treatment from overworked and under-appreciated teachers. He sees me as meddlesome—one of those mothers who stirs up trouble for sport. And I am asking for special treatment. I am asking the teachers not to soak my daughter in the boiling sludge of a deadly craze, regardless of the cultural climate and school policy. Go ahead. Call me Karen. I don’t give a fuck. Not where my daughter is concerned.

He thinks the right course of action would be to write my state representatives. This is why he is happy to help me hone my comments for the upcoming school board meeting.

My two-minute statement to the School Board — Friday, September 9, 2022

Mr. Miller feels further discomfort with my level of obsession. In his eyes I am undermining my relationship with Miss Miller because I’ve perseverated myself to the point where I can’t see her through any lens other than gender identity. This a valid point, so I work to relate to her on every other level. But my husband also has known me since the dawn of time, aka 1991. I am an obsessive gal. When I take an interest in a subject, look out. I’m going in one thousand percent.

So here we are one thousand percent later. Unlike Mr. Miller, whose life does not capsize when our daughter breezily muses of maybe one day taking “just hormones and stuff,” I start this blog, begin fighting the high school’s transgender policy, leave the Democratic party, cancel my New York Times subscription, pay The Daily Wire to watch What is a Woman, along with every other gender-critical documentary I can find, join my local ROGD parent group, buy a stack of books, and subscribe to dozens of gender-related Substacks and podcasts, plus Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson who Mr. Miller loathes. Like, bangs-his-fists-on-the-steering-wheel loathes.

Which brings me to Jordan Peterson’s podcast episode with Helen Joyce, author of Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. YouTube banned the video for “hate speech.”

I send a sixty-second clip (14:49 - 15:49) to Mr. Miller which he blesses me by listening to. The clip answers a question Mr. Miller has asked regarding the link between CRT and transgender identity—you know, when middle-class white kids learn that they’re evil oppressors and feel deep shame so they identify into a permissible marginalized group—aka trans—and voila.

His question is, “So why didn’t this happen to Miller Jr?” It feels like a “gotcha.”

In the clip, Peterson says,

As soon as girls hit puberty, their proclivity to experience negative emotion—so that’s shame and guilt and disappointment and fear and depression—is elevated markedly in contrast to men. And it’s permanently transformed at puberty and it stays stable for the rest of women’s lives, and so women reliably experience more negative emotion than men on average.

We women have more shame, guilt, anxiety, depression (God help me), which explains why adolescent girls lead the charge when it comes to social contagions, and ironically proves the biological difference between males and females. And it most likely explains—at least partly—why I’m losing my mind over this issue and Mr. Miller isn’t.

Incidentally, the segment where JP defends himself against the criticism he receives for “attacking” Elliot Page brings me to tears. He gets choked up, I get choked up… And there I am, drinking lukewarm coffee and sobbing in the kitchen. It happens a lot now. The sheer horror of what is being peddled to children, wrapped in a glittery bow…

So yeah. Marriage.

I love Mr. Miller. He says he loves me, but I don’t believe him anymore. He loves Miss Miller. That I know. He doesn’t want her to grow a beard and cut off her breasts, and he feels sure that she won’t, whereas I won’t breathe easy until she disavows the ideology. I long to see her discard it like an old t-shirt she’s grown out of.

It’s worth noting that Mr. Miller reads this blog. Which is to say, as stressed and angry as I regularly find myself, I’m safe to share my feelings here. There’s a solid foundation underneath this shit-storm even if I don’t always recognize it. That’s another difference between us—he has an inherent sense of security that I lack. It’s what drew me to him in the first place. And like I said—we’ve been together since the dawn of time. That counts for something.

⌛️