The Cost of Capitulation.
When every day feels like a roller coaster ride.
I often feel like I’m strapped into a roller coaster I never agreed to ride—high one moment, falling precipitously the next. My stomach rarely finds equilibrium. The rush of excitement and the fleeting euphoria I experience are extinguished in an instant, replaced by dread that creeps in like fog rolling across a dark field.
If you’re a parent of a transgender or gender-expansive child, you know exactly what I mean. These wild swings in emotion aren’t random—they’re the direct result of a news cycle that feels like it was engineered to break us.
Take the week before last, for example.
On Tuesday night, Democrats swept off-cycle elections in multiple states. By Wednesday morning, the election results in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia were being hailed as a firm rebuke of the anti-trans campaigns that dominated those contests for months.
Families exhaled—fully, finally. Not a cautious, half-measured breath, but a true release. Parents told me they slept for the first time in weeks. Kids went to school a little lighter. Plans to pack up the car and leave their state—or their country—were paused.
And then, in a matter of hours, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to enforce its policy requiring passport sex designations to match the sex assigned at birth.
Just like that, the floor disappeared beneath us. Again.
The joy and reprieve that families had been clinging to evaporated overnight. Parents were once again thrown into crisis mode:
What does this mean for my child’s passport application?
Do we leave now? Do we wait?
If we leave, where will we go, and will we get out before the next executive order drops?
How do I keep my kid’s hope alive when I’m running on fumes myself?
I understand these emotions intimately. I vacillate between hope and despair constantly.
When pro-equality candidates win elections, I celebrate with other parents. I allow myself to believe—if only briefly—that the world is tilting toward justice. I want to bask in that warmth. Hold it. Protect that quiet sense of hope that comes in moments when the world feels like it might still make room for our children.
And then the pendulum swings back. A federal court hands down a decision with nationwide implications, or an agency quietly changes a policy, or some extremist lawmaker introduces a bill that would criminalize parents like me. Suddenly that hope, that fragile thing I was holding, feels like it’s been ripped away.
A few days ago, Congress managed to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government. The shutdown—stretching 43 days, surpassing even the 2018 shutdown—finally ended.
The Senate’s “clean” bill stripped out the House’s anti-trans provisions: no federal funding bans on gender-affirming care, no prohibitions on protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, no codification of Trump’s national trans sports ban.
Once again, families like mine breathed a sigh of relief.
But it was a conditional relief. A time-limited reprieve. A stay of execution set to expire in January. And it landed with the eerie familiarity of living in an earthquake zone—you’re grateful the shaking stopped, but you know it’s only a matter of time before the next tremor hits.
That constant instability does something to a parent. It rewires you.
I remember sitting in my kitchen late one night—Hobbes long asleep—refreshing news alerts on my phone as if I could will good news into existence. At one point I looked up and realized I had been sitting there for two hours, waiting for an update that wasn’t coming.
Another time, after a particularly brutal policy announcement, Hobbes said matter-of-factly, “I guess we know where I won’t be going to college next year.” All I could say was “Nah, baby, I guess not. It’s not safe there.”
Safety is not something this administration guarantees our children. And so I swallowed the lump in my throat and said, “We will figure it out. I promise you that.” And then I spent the rest of the night researching affirming colleges and universities, states with codified anti-discrimination laws, emergency options for families like ours.
Across the country, parents are doing the same thing—balancing hope with strategy, optimism with preparedness. We’re organizing carpools and school support groups while also bookmarking immigration attorneys. We’re helping our kids study for finals while calculating whether we could uproot our lives in 30 days if necessary.
This is what the cost of capitulation looks like: the psychological toll of constantly responding to decisions made by people who have never met our children yet legislate as though our kids are the problem.
So what do we do when everything around us feels like it’s falling apart?
We hold the line.
We refuse to catastrophize, even when the headlines try their best to drag us into the abyss. We honor our fear without letting it govern our decisions. We make pragmatic plans while still believing in the possibility of change.
We keep our kids close.
We remind them that they are loved, protected, and worthy.
We remind ourselves that our children are not bargaining chips in someone else’s political game.
And we continue to act—strategically, persistently, collectively—to resist the pressures that seek to break our spirit or diminish our resolve.
Hope is not naïve.
Hope is not passive.
Hope is not capitulation.
Hope is choosing to believe in a future where our kids are free, even when the world gives us every reason to believe otherwise.
Hope is the resistance.
Hope is the work.
And until the tides turn again—and they will—hope will have to be enough to carry us through the next rise and the next fall of this endless roller coaster.