When the School Has Already Gotten There

Some parents reading this book are not arriving early. The conversation has already happened in the school, the grammar is already installed, and the child is somewhere in the middle of figuring out what to do with it.

The first thing to name is what has not happened. The school's framework arriving first does not mean the vine is inaccessible. The grammar of desire-as-identity can be met with something better once a child is old enough to think about categories. This is harder than forming early. It requires the parent to be honest about what the child has been told, respectful of the child's experience, and genuinely able to offer something better rather than a counter-prohibition.

A counter-prohibition is not formation. Telling a child that what the school taught is wrong without giving them a better account of what is true produces a child with two competing rules and no grammar for evaluating either. The parent has to offer the competing grammar—John 17:3, the known self, desire within design, the vine available now—with enough warmth and honesty that the child has a reason to inhabit it rather than simply a rule to comply with.

Aurora Regino, the California mother whose fifth-grade daughter was counseled in 2022 on gender transition under a different name without parental knowledge, said in a public interview that her daughter now again identifies as female. The formation the school installed was not the last word. That outcome is not guaranteed. Formation runs deep in either direction. But it is possible, and the vine was not too late.

A child who has already embraced an identity built on the school's framework is not first an argument to be won. They are a person to be known. The vine is not received through debate. It is received through encounter, through being genuinely loved by someone who lives in it. The formation that arrives second has to be carried by relationship rather than by authority, because the authority's window may already be closing.

None of this means the parent accommodates what is false. It means the parent is more committed to the child knowing the vine than to winning the argument. Those are not the same commitment, and the one that wins will determine whether the door stays open.

Chapter Twelve