Hi friends and welcome newcomers! Here’s a story some of you might relate to about a female friendship gone awry.
When my brother, Peter, was a pre-teen, he hung a sign on his bedroom door:
I thought of that sign last week after an old friend unilaterally terminated our friendship in a fiery email, blistered with blame and anger. Suddenly I understood the wisdom in Peter’s humorous message. When you go away mad, you redefine your legacy. Instead of being a person who will be remembered fondly, you become a person who will be remembered as one who slammed the door in someone else’s face.
“You’re transphobic,” my now-former friend wrote last week. And “wrong.” And “spreading lies. I’m saying goodbye.”
I disagree with all of that. Even the “good” part of “goodbye.”
What to do with unresolved feelings?
I’m angry and sad but after years of intermittent conflict, relieved. I’m left with questions not only about her leaving but also about my staying.
Our rupture began two and a half years ago. That’s when I started discussing my conviction that female athletes need all-female spaces in which to train, compete, and win. Which we used to have. Which is the whole point of women’s sports. Which I have dedicated most of my life to.
My door-slamming former friend – let’s call her Slammer – shut the conversation down. “We will not discuss this. There is no way I would ever debate you about these dear people's lives,” she said, referring to transgender people.
To me, friends are people who listen respectfully. Slammer wouldn’t. It’s not that I need to discuss women’s sports with all of my friends. Not everyone’s interested, and I care about other things and people, too.1 But while insisting I not mention my trans-related work, Slammer happily reported on her own trans-related advocacy – which felt restrictive and unfair. As our relationship disintegrated, marred by her censorship and my complaints about the censorship imbalance, we approached an impasse. I expected us to drift apart. Maybe we’d send a fond text or card now and then. That (or a phone call) would have felt so much better.
Trans people are her people. Female athletes are mine.
Slammer is a lesbian for whom the LGBTQ identity is paramount. Post-marriage equality, the predominant letter is now the T. She volunteers to visit transgender patients after mastectomies and genital surgeries. These are her people.
My people are female athletes of all ages and abilities.
Now that males who identify as transgender are insisting on access to women’s sports and locker rooms, our politics clash. But this never felt like a political conflict. It felt personal.
In my opinion, Slammer has grown attached to her identity as an ally for members of her community who seem vulnerable and victimized. To challenge any aspect of transgender beliefs or behavior is to threaten her core sense of self.
As for me, I’m attached to my identity as an athlete. I feel protective of all-female sports experiences that, as a child, saved me. Sports provided me with strength and confidence. They freed me from femininity straitjackets — offering warmup jackets as an attractive alternative. Meanwhile, gender-nonconforming, lesbian, and athletic girls are now the ones most likely to claim a trans identity, which worries me, and leads me to believe I Would Have Been Trans’ed.
Estrangement Number Two
Slammer and I used to be close. She was affectionate, insightful, fun, kind. Forty-five years ago, I paid her expenses for a months-long vacation in France when I was spending an unexpectedly lonely year there playing professional basketball. Five years ago, she and her wife flew from northern California to Phoenix to attend my mother’s memorial service.
I might have attended her parents’ memorial services too, except Slammer had severed our friendship during a ten-year period when her parents died. Yes, she is a recidivist slammer. Estrangement Number One looked almost identical, with Slammer cutting off all contact in a different fury of anger and accusation.
When she departed that first time, I told my mother about it. I was about 30. Mom noted, “Well, you can’t stay friends with everyone.”
After those ten estranged years, Slammer apologized and asked if we could reconcile. I hesitated, eventually accepting her back into my life after we agreed to one condition: She would never again depart in a huff.
I should have listened to Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Or even the second time. A few years ago, Slammer told me she had abruptly cut off all contact with a close friend after he made a remark that offended her wife.
Disconnectors and Connectors
“What I see is that she’s a disconnector and you’re a connector,” offers
, one of several friends I’ve kept since elementary school. “You have an unusually large capacity for staying connected with people – including me, Barb, Gernie. You build and keep relationships.”That echoed something else my mother once said: “When something is amiss in a relationship, you work hard to resolve things.”
Doesn’t everyone? I thought. But I accepted it as a compliment.
Maybe I tried too hard to resolve things.
I wonder, though, if that strength might also be a weakness. Did I try too hard, or for too long, to repair our friendship? After all, you can’t stay friends with everyone.
In our final phone conversation, I asked Slammer, “Can’t old friends express anger and talk it through?” Then came her email: Hell no.
I can only reconnect with myself – and maybe you.
Now that my antagonist has disappeared (and I will not reconcile again), the only person I can reconnect with is myself.
That’s why I write. For me, it’s essential. I write to metabolize my life, inhaling experiences and exhaling stories and ideas that bring clarity. I find pleasure in transforming chaos into art.
I also write to connect with you, my readers.
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
Thanks to Debra Babcock, Judy Catterton, and
Some other female friendships (my own and others I hear about) are also strained by these emotionally-charged questions: Who qualifies as a female athlete? Who even qualifies as a female? Such rifts can be painful. I encourage all of us to seek ways to keep the doors to conversation, and the doors to our hearts, open.
I have experienced this quite frequently, mostly with women. What’s particularly painful about it is that they refuse to process WHY you think what you do, which could lead to a better understanding. To my mind, it makes no sense whatsoever to promote transgender as a belief system. It’s obviously harmful. Yet most people I know have no idea what they’re supporting, while I’ve done the deep dive and listening to me could be very enlightening. Evidence upon evidence that this is running off the rails.
I had a friend tell me what Jordan Peterson thinks. I asked if she’d heard HIM say that. Nope. When I tried to clarify she practically threw me out of the car. A cousin blocked me on Facebook for presenting the context of Trump’s “bloodbath.”
These are moral narcissists and if not that, women in my experience are more susceptible to shutting out information; this probably explains separate colleges, which has been suggested to return to given female dominated universities are now overrun by feelings culture.
It’s ironic how little they can take while insisting they should be running the world. But you can’t run the world fairly if you won’t listen to the other side.
Yep. Lost my bestie over it. One of her partner's kids really wants to get his d*ck cut off, and my kid went through a period of being enby. We both struggled with the issue and came out on different sides of it, and she just stopped communicating. Her partner is utterly captured, his son is using all of the manipulation tactics on him including claiming to have attempted suicide. I want to give her the benefit of the doubt & say the partner must have forced her to choose between his family & me, but I don't know what actually happened. It's REALLY tough.
My brother is also on the other side, but thankfully it hasn't cost us the relationship. It's been sobering and edifying to see the cult's influence close-up on an otherwise-rational liberal who sees himself as highly enlightened. Every response from him, regardless of what point I'm making about fairness in competitive sport or negative side-effects of puberty blockers or what have you, amounts to "OMG the poor trans people have it so hard, they didn't choose this". Every. Single. Time.
It's maddening.