I spent this week’s live revisiting three essays from my old Pink Hair and Pronouns publication and talking about my younger daughter’s gender journey—from coming out as genderfluid during the COVID pandemic to eventually coming “back in” to her original gender.
What surprised me wasn’t the stories themselves. It was the distance between the woman who wrote them and the woman reading them now.
When I wrote those essays in 2024, I carried an assumption that now feels painfully naive: that we were moving toward greater safety, acceptance, and freedom for trans and gender-nonconforming people. Reading them again, I could feel that optimism on every page.
The essays still hold up. What changed is the world around them.
So today, we talked about parenting (and living) through uncertainty. Mostly, though, it was a conversation about love. About trusting our kids. About resisting fear. And about refusing to obey in advance when the people we love are the ones being targeted.
Here are the three essays:
Thank you Dr. Amber Hull, Chris Resists, Gloria Brewer, Kristen Morosky Day, Teralex 🚫👑’s, and many others for tuning in.
Special thanks to my Founding Members—and we’ve got some new ones this week! Julie Roginsky, Michelle Kinney, Amy Gabrielle, Linnea_at_large, Joyce J. Jordan, Pietra Shirley, Suzanne Whitaker, Karen Marie Shelton, Mason/She/Her🩷💜💙, Alan Wiley, Craig Weissman, and Shālah B Pookie. You’re the very best and I’m so grateful for your support.
Thanks for listening.
I’m Dana DuBois, an essayist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest — and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show.
Through memoir writing, audio storytelling, and community spaces, I explore the larger cultural forces shaping relationships, feminism, parenting, media, modern dating, and life in mid-flight.
Paid subscriptions help support Sunday Salon, narrated essays, live conversations, and the ongoing work of building I Write Out Loud into a sustained independent creative practice.
If this conversation resonated with you, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription.
