A Blue Wave Built on Betrayal Will Break Before 2028
Amy Acton Had Choices
The Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio could have said that governors are required to enforce constitutional laws, even when they disagree with them. She could have said that sports governing bodies should develop evidence-based participation rules without politicians humiliating children for campaign applause. She could have acknowledged that Ohio law currently restricts transgender athletes while promising that every student would be treated with dignity.
Instead, when asked about transgender participation in sports, Acton said: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” She then described Ohio’s ban as settled law and said she would enforce it.
Transgender girls are not boys.
That was not an unavoidable explanation of a governor’s constitutional responsibilities. It was a choice to adopt the language of the people attacking us.
It was also a choice made only weeks after Acton marched in Columbus Pride—a familiar Democratic ritual in which candidates celebrate LGBTQ people when the cameras are colorful, the crowds are friendly and nothing politically difficult is being demanded of them.
The question Democrats need to answer is no longer whether Republicans are coming for transgender people. They plainly are. The question is whether Democrats intend to defend us, or merely manage the speed at which our rights are taken away.
Because if Democrats capture a blue wave in November by validating the premise that transgender people are dangerous, deceptive or inherently unfair, they may win seats in 2026 while poisoning their coalition for 2028.
A wave built on betrayal does not become a governing majority.
It becomes a temporary sugar high followed by an ugly withdrawal.
This Is Becoming a Pattern
Acton is not operating in isolation.
California Governor Gavin Newsom; an ambitious Democrat who plainly understands that every sentence he speaks will be examined through the lens of 2028; invited conservative activist Charlie Kirk onto his podcast in 2025 and agreed that transgender participation in women’s sports was “deeply unfair.”
Newsom simultaneously spoke about the cruelty transgender people face. That may have made his answer feel more compassionate to him. It did not make the political calculation less obvious: express concern for transgender lives, then concede the central premise of the campaign being used to drive transgender people out of public life.
Pete Buttigieg took a more careful route, but he stumbled over the same political tripwire. He acknowledged what he called “serious fairness issues” and suggested that sports leagues and local communities—not national politicians—should determine participation policies.
That is materially different from endorsing a blanket ban. It is also far better than deliberately calling transgender girls boys.
But Buttigieg, one of the most prominent openly gay politicians in American history, still allowed the discussion to remain inside the right’s preferred frame: that transgender children themselves are the problem to be managed.
I love Pete. That is precisely why his answer was so disappointing. An LGBTQ politician should understand better than almost anyone what happens when the majority begins debating which members of our community are respectable enough, normal enough or politically convenient enough to defend.
During his 2024 Senate campaign in Texas, Democrat Colin Allred responded to attacks from Ted Cruz by declaring, “I do not support boys in girls’ sports.” Allred had previously compiled a substantially pro-LGBTQ voting record. Under political pressure, however, he answered an attack on transgender people by accepting the attacker’s language.
He lost anyway.
After the 2024 election, Representative Seth Moulton said he did not want his daughters competing against a “male or formerly male athlete.” Other Democrats, including Tom Suozzi, argued that the party had become too rigid or politically vulnerable on transgender sports.
Again, the language was not incidental. It transformed transgender girls from young people playing school sports into threatening male bodies invading girls’ spaces.
Now we have Ohio.
Acton is not the only Democrat in the state retreating. Representative Marcy Kaptur was one of eight House Democrats who voted for legislation that would threaten federal funding for schools over policies involving students’ names, pronouns, bathrooms, locker rooms and loosely defined “gender ideology.” Meanwhile, Sherrod Brown’s 2026 Senate campaign has also responded to the sports question by emphasizing that Ohio law is already settled rather than offering a clear defense of transgender Ohioans.
In New Hampshire, legislation restricting puberty blockers and hormone treatment for minors passed with support from two Democratic members of the state House before being signed into law in 2025.
At the federal level, 81 House Democrats voted for the final 2024 National Defense Authorization Act even though it included a provision restricting TRICARE coverage for certain gender-affirming care for the transgender children of military families. Some of those members opposed the rider and argued that they were voting for the enormous defense package despite it.
That explanation may describe the legislative trade-off accurately.
It also reveals the trade-off: transgender children became acceptable collateral damage.
In December 2025, three House Democrats joined Republicans to pass legislation that could expose providers of gender-affirming care for minors to severe federal criminal penalties. The measure passed the House 216–211.
One example can be dismissed as an awkward answer.
Two can be called strategic triangulation.
At some point, however, we have to admit that a section of the Democratic Party has decided transgender people are the easiest members of its coalition to sacrifice.
Apparently, “My Body, My Choice” Has an Asterisk
Democrats are overwhelmingly and correctly pro-choice.
The principle underlying that position is supposed to be larger than any single medical procedure: intimate health decisions belong to patients, families and qualified medical professionals; not governors, legislators, campaign consultants or cable-news panels.
That principle has been part of Democratic politics for decades.
During the Clinton era, Democrats repeatedly argued that government had no place inside the most intimate medical decisions made by patients, families and doctors.
It was a good principle then.
It is a good principle now.
So what happened to it when the patient became transgender?
Apparently, Democrats believe a pregnant woman and her doctor should be protected from government interference—but a transgender teenager, her parents, her pediatrician, her therapist and her endocrinologist can all be overruled by a state legislator who has never met her.
Apparently, bodily autonomy is sacred unless the body is transgender.
Apparently, the government should stay out of the examination room unless there might be puberty blockers inside it.
Apparently, parents should be trusted to make agonizing medical decisions for their children—until their child says she is a girl.
That is not a coherent principle.
It is a political exemption written in disappearing ink.
And let us be precise about the word choice.
Transgender children do not simply wake up one morning and choose to be transgender because they saw something on TikTok, wanted attention or were recruited by a public-school librarian.
What they may choose is whether to tell someone.
They may choose whether to stop hiding.
They may choose to ask their parents to use the name that no longer makes them flinch.
They may choose to walk into a therapist’s office and finally explain why puberty feels terrifying rather than exciting.
They may choose—with their parents and clinicians—to explore what care is appropriate, what care is not appropriate and what can safely wait.
For children who have not reached puberty, established gender-affirming care does not involve hormones or surgery. It may involve listening, family support, social affirmation and mental-health care.
For some adolescents, after assessment and consultation, care may eventually include puberty-delaying medication or hormones. Professional guidelines describe a staged process: no medical intervention before puberty, puberty-delaying treatment when clinically appropriate, hormones considered as adolescents mature and major surgery generally deferred until adulthood.
This is not a child marching into Walgreens alone and ordering a new body before algebra class.
It is health care.
It involves diagnosis, informed consent or assent, parental participation, continuing evaluation and professionals trained to distinguish gender dysphoria from other mental-health concerns.
Democrats understand every part of that argument when discussing reproductive care.
They understand that an abortion patient is not receiving treatment without medical consultation simply because the slogan says “choice.”
They understand that autonomy does not mean medicine without standards.
They understand that trusting patients does not mean abandoning informed consent.
They understand that protecting a medical decision from political interference does not mean every patient automatically receives every requested treatment.
Yet when transgender children are involved, some Democrats suddenly adopt the Republican fantasy that care is being dispensed recklessly by doctors, demanded impulsively by children and concealed from helpless parents.
The standard changes because the patient changes.
That should terrify every person who believes her own medical care is politically safe.
Which Children Count as Children?
When reports emerged that a United States military strike had hit a school in Iran, leading Democrats were rightly horrified.
They demanded investigations. They demanded accountability. They condemned the killing of children as appalling and unacceptable.
They were right.
Children should not be treated as acceptable collateral damage.
Children should not pay for the recklessness, ambition or ideological obsessions of adults.
Children should not be forced to carry consequences they had no role in creating.
But Democrats need to explain why that moral clarity becomes cloudy when the children are transgender.
The girls inside a bombed school are properly recognized as girls when their girlhood intensifies the horror of their deaths.
A transgender girl in Ohio becomes a “boy” the moment recognizing her girlhood becomes politically inconvenient.
One group of children inspires solemn press releases about protecting innocent lives.
Another group is discussed as a polling liability.
One group deserves immediate accountability when government action puts them in danger.
The other is told that its suffering is unfortunate, but the law is settled.
To be absolutely clear: a military strike on a school and a government restricting medical treatment are not the same act.
They do not inflict the same harm.
They do not operate on the same timescale.
One can kill children in an instant. The other can compound fear, dysphoria, isolation and hopelessness over months or years.
The comparison is not equivalence.
The connection is the question underneath both:
Do children deserve protection from government decisions that foreseeably place them in danger?
Democrats apparently know the answer when the danger comes from Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth.
They become far less certain when the danger comes from a politically convenient health-care ban.
Stop Using Suicide as a Footnote
Transgender children experience sharply elevated rates of depression, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts.
Those disparities are not evidence that being transgender is itself a disease. Medical organizations point to a combination of gender dysphoria, bullying, discrimination, family rejection, social stigma and distress associated with unwanted physical development.
No responsible advocate should claim that any single medication guarantees a child will not attempt suicide.
No honest researcher should pretend the evidence is complete, that every patient responds identically or that every clinical question has been conclusively resolved.
But uncertainty is not permission for politicians to invent their own medicine.
Medical organizations have warned that denying appropriately evaluated gender-affirming care can worsen mental distress for some young people. Observational research has associated access to puberty blockers or hormones with lower rates of depression and suicidality, while professional guidelines emphasize individualized evaluation and continuing mental-health support.
That does not mean every transgender teenager needs medication.
It means politicians cannot honestly claim that taking treatment away is a neutral act.
When lawmakers force a stable patient to discontinue care, prohibit a physician from recommending an available treatment or tell a child that the state considers her identity fraudulent, they are not merely “declining to affirm” something.
They are introducing a new source of distress into the life of a child who may already be vulnerable.
They are gambling with someone else’s daughter.
And then they have the audacity to describe the gamble as child protection.
Even worse, the political attack can reach beyond medication.
Gender-affirming care commonly includes psychological assessment, counseling, family education and treatment for depression, anxiety or trauma.
When politicians smear every affirming clinician as an ideologue or predator, families may become afraid to seek any care at all.
Providers leave states.
Clinics reduce services.
Children learn that even admitting how they feel may place their parents, doctors or custody arrangements at risk.
The cruelty is not limited to the prescription that never gets written.
It begins with the child who learns that honesty is dangerous.
Democrats would never accept this logic from Republicans in the abortion debate.
They would never say that because research continues to develop, legislators should be free to substitute their judgment for an obstetrician’s.
They would never accept that a minority of complicated cases justifies a blanket prohibition.
They would never shrug and say that because a court permitted an abortion restriction, the moral question was now settled.
They would correctly point out that abortion bans do not merely regulate procedures. They frighten doctors, close clinics, delay treatment and turn private medical crises into legal hazards.
The same institutional damage occurs when transgender health care is criminalized or politically terrorized.
A doctor should not need to consult a criminal-defense attorney before treating a depressed teenager.
A parent should not have to consider moving to another state so her child can continue receiving care.
A therapist should not have to wonder whether affirming a patient’s identity will be characterized as indoctrination.
A child should not have to become suicidal enough to be taken seriously.
Choice Cannot Belong Only to Politically Popular Patients
Bodily autonomy is either a principle or a campaign slogan.
If Democrats believe government should not force a pregnant patient to continue a pregnancy, they should understand why government should not force a transgender teenager through an unwanted puberty without allowing her family and physicians even to consider alternatives.
If Democrats believe medical decisions should account for the individual patient rather than a politician’s theology, they should apply that belief to gender dysphoria.
If Democrats believe doctors should be allowed to practice evidence-based medicine without threats of prison, they should defend endocrinologists, pediatricians and therapists with the same urgency that they defend obstetricians.
And if Democrats believe parents know their children better than the state, they should not abandon that conviction the moment a parent supports her transgender child.
There will be difficult cases.
There will be disagreements about age, treatment, evidence and informed consent.
There will be patients who receive care and later wish they had made different choices, just as there are patients in every other field of medicine who experience regret, complications or changing circumstances.
The existence of difficult cases is an argument for careful medicine.
It is not an argument for government prohibition.
The Democratic answer should be simple:
Being transgender is not a crime.
Gender dysphoria is not a campaign prop.
Parents are not child abusers because they listen to their children.
Doctors are not predators because they follow clinical guidelines.
And transgender children should not have to prove that they are close enough to death before Democrats decide their health care is worth defending.
The old Democratic formulation was that government should stay out of the doctor’s office.
It was never supposed to mean: Unless the patient is transgender.
The Argument Is About Far More Than Sports
The political obsession with transgender athletes is wildly disproportionate to the number of people involved.
When the NCAA’s president testified before Congress, he said he knew of fewer than ten transgender athletes among more than half a million NCAA competitors. That number was not a comprehensive census, but it gives us some sense of scale.
We are reorganizing national politics around a population small enough to fit inside a passenger van.
This does not mean there can never be a complicated question involving eligibility, age, puberty, hormones, competitive level or a particular sport. Serious questions deserve serious standards developed from evidence.
But that is not what Republican campaigns are offering.
They are not proposing careful distinctions among elementary-school recreation, high-school teams, elite competition and professional athletics. They are using a handful of athletes to construct an entire social mythology: transgender people as cheaters, predators, infiltrators and frauds.
Sports are the door.
Once the public accepts that transgender people are fundamentally dishonest about who we are, the same premise can be carried into bathrooms, schools, identification documents, health care, military service, prisons, employment and the right to exist in public.
That is why Democrats who believe they can concede “only sports” are fooling themselves.
There is no “only sports” campaign.
There is a campaign to define transgender people as illegitimate. Sports are simply the focus-grouped entry point.
Recent Supreme Court decisions upholding transgender sports restrictions will encourage even more Democrats to call the matter settled. But a Supreme Court ruling establishes what a law may constitutionally do at that moment.
It does not require a political party to embrace the law, repeat its propaganda or abandon efforts to change it.
Segregation was once settled law.
Bans on interracial marriage were once settled law.
The criminalization of same-sex intimacy was once settled law.
“Settled law” has always been one of politics’ favorite ways to disguise a moral surrender as reluctant professionalism.
The Dixiecrat Parallel… and Its Limits
The struggle over transgender rights is not the same as the Black freedom struggle.
Transgender sports restrictions are not slavery. They are not lynching. They are not the full machinery of Jim Crow.
Any comparison that erases the unique history, scale and brutality of anti-Black oppression is historically reckless and morally wrong.
But political movements do not have to be identical for their mechanisms to be related.
For decades, the national Democratic Party tolerated and empowered Southern segregationists because party leaders believed they needed the Solid South to maintain a national coalition.
Southern Democrats accumulated seniority and controlled powerful congressional committees, allowing them to obstruct civil-rights legislation even while other Democrats claimed to support equality.
The Dixiecrats who broke from the party in 1948 were not merely timid allies offering watered-down support. They were committed segregationists. Strom Thurmond’s States’ Rights Democratic campaign explicitly defended segregation and opposed federal civil-rights protections.
The relevant parallel is therefore not between transgender people and Black Americans, or between today’s nervous Democratic candidates and the Dixiecrats themselves.
The parallel is the political bargain surrounding them.
Party leaders decided that the rights of a vulnerable minority could be delayed, diluted or traded away to preserve an electoral coalition.
They told people suffering injustice to wait because the next election was too important.
Then the election after that became too important.
And then the one after that.
There is another lesson from 1948 that today’s consultants rarely mention.
President Harry Truman embraced a stronger civil-rights platform. Southern segregationists walked out of the Democratic convention and formed the Dixiecrat ticket. Political experts predicted disaster.
Truman won anyway.
The broader partisan realignment over civil rights took decades and cannot be compressed into one election or one heroic president. But Truman’s victory remains a useful answer to the belief that moral courage is automatically electoral suicide.
Sometimes voters respect a party that knows what it stands for.
Sometimes appeasement loses both the people being appeased and the people being abandoned.
A Blue Wave Can Still Be a Political Defeat
There is every reason for LGBTQ voters to understand the material difference between Democratic and Republican government.
Republican lawmakers are proposing and passing the overwhelming majority of restrictions on transgender health care, education, identification and public participation.
A Republican administration in Ohio would almost certainly be far more hostile to transgender people than an Acton administration.
That reality cannot be wished away.
But “the other side is worse” is an argument for harm reduction.
It is not a lifetime absolution from accountability.
Democrats cannot demand queer votes, queer money, queer volunteers and queer organizing while treating queer rights as an optional platform accessory.
They cannot march at Pride in June, misgender transgender children in July and expect unquestioning loyalty in November.
The danger to 2028 comes from several directions.
First, every Democratic concession teaches Republicans that the attack works.
When a Democrat answers an anti-transgender advertisement by repeating its premise, Republican consultants do not conclude that the subject has been neutralized.
They conclude that Democrats are afraid—and increase the volume.
Second, the retreat destroys trust among the people Democrats need most intensely.
Younger voters, LGBTQ voters, activists and volunteers are not interchangeable pieces of campaign machinery.
They notice when the party celebrates their labor but bargains away their lives.
That does not necessarily mean they will vote Republican. Many will still vote Democratic because they understand the stakes.
But some will stop donating.
Some will stop knocking doors.
Some will stop defending candidates in conversations with friends.
Some will become occasional voters instead of reliable ones.
Some will support primary challengers.
A coalition can lose its energy long before it loses every vote.
Third, concessions create a policy ratchet.
Republicans impose a new restriction.
Democrats decide reversing it would be politically risky.
The restriction becomes “settled law.”
Republicans then move to the next restriction, while Democrats congratulate themselves for preventing something even worse.
Rights disappear one compromise at a time.
Fourth, it guarantees more brutal Democratic primaries.
A candidate who asks transgender people to accept humiliation in 2026 should expect a challenger in 2028.
A member of Congress who votes for legislation criminalizing transgender health care cannot reasonably demand that the left forget the vote in the name of party unity.
Unity is not silence imposed on the people being sacrificed.
Unity requires a shared commitment that makes continued cooperation possible.
The Coming Intraparty Fight
The conflict is already visible between establishment Democrats, the organized socialist left and a broader progressive movement that does not always belong to the Democratic Socialists of America but shares many of its frustrations.
DSA has made explicit defense of transgender people part of its national political identity.
That creates the ingredients for a serious collision.
Establishment Democrats will argue that candidates such as Acton are contesting difficult states and must be permitted to neutralize culturally divisive issues.
The left will answer that calling transgender girls boys does not neutralize the issue.
It ratifies the right’s worldview.
Establishment leaders will demand unity behind incumbents because control of Congress is at stake.
Progressives will ask why unity always seems to require marginalized people to surrender first.
Candidates will not merely disagree over tax rates, health-insurance structures or appropriations.
They will accuse one another of either abandoning civil rights or imposing ideological purity tests that cost the party elections.
Those are not easy wounds to close after a primary.
If Democrats win only a narrow House majority, the conflict could spill from campaigns onto the House floor.
A relatively small group of members can withhold votes on leadership, rules and major legislation. Republicans have repeatedly shown how effectively a disciplined faction can incapacitate its own majority.
There is no guarantee that Democratic progressives would reproduce that chaos.
Nor would every conflict be driven by DSA members.
But a party that refuses to resolve fundamental moral disagreements should not be surprised when those disagreements become procedural warfare.
You cannot build a functioning caucus by telling one faction that human rights are negotiable and another that objecting to the negotiation is disloyal.
That is not a coalition.
It is a ceasefire with no agreed border.
Democrats Need an Answer That Is Both Moral and Politically Competent
Republicans have spent enormous sums turning a tiny population into a national threat.
Democrats have often responded in one of two ways: complete avoidance or panicked concession.
Neither works.
Post-election research has suggested that anti-transgender policies were decisive for only a relatively small portion of voters, while voters motivated by LGBTQ equality overwhelmingly supported Democrats.
The lesson should not be that Democratic candidates must avoid the subject.
It should be that they need a competent answer.
The answer does not require every Democratic candidate to pretend that every athletic policy is simple.
It requires them to stop treating transgender identity as fraudulent.
A competent answer might sound something like this:
Transgender children deserve the same safety, dignity and opportunity as every other child. Athletic organizations can establish age-appropriate and sport-specific rules based on evidence, competitive level and the realities of each activity. Politicians should not impose sweeping bans or turn individual children into campaign targets. Our schools have more urgent problems than adults hunting for vulnerable students to humiliate.
That answer does not resolve every eligibility question.
It does something more important:
It refuses the lie that transgender girls are boys.
Democrats could also remind voters who benefits from the distraction.
While families struggle with rent, health-insurance premiums, child care and groceries, Republican politicians are demanding genital inspections, policing pronouns and investigating who may enter a school locker room.
The party should be capable of defending transgender people while making the opposition look as obsessive and invasive as it actually is.
That requires courage.
But it also requires basic political skill.
You Are Not Safe Because You Are Not First
Some gay, lesbian and bisexual voters may be tempted to view the attack on transgender people as a separate controversy—painful, perhaps, but politically containable.
It is not.
The same movement targeting transgender health care is attacking drag performances, inclusive books, LGBTQ teachers, same-sex marriage protections and the right of queer families to be recognized.
The vocabulary shifts, but the accusation remains familiar:
That LGBTQ people are dangerous to children, deceptive about our identities and unworthy of ordinary public life.
Transgender people are not being targeted because Republicans intend to stop with transgender people.
We are being targeted because strategists believe we are the part of the rainbow coalition that Democrats can be frightened into abandoning.
And once a party demonstrates that one group can be exchanged for a few polling points, every other group receives the same message:
Your rights are secure only until they become inconvenient.
If Democrats will sacrifice transgender children to win an election, why should gay parents trust them when same-sex adoption becomes the next focus-grouped wedge?
Why should nonbinary workers trust them when workplace protections become politically awkward?
Why should lesbians trust them when the right intensifies its campaign to portray queer women as predators or failed women?
Why should bisexual people trust a party that already treats their community as visible only when convenient?
Why should any racial, religious or immigrant minority believe that its place in the coalition is unconditional?
The answer cannot simply be that Democrats are better than Republicans.
They are better on LGBTQ rights.
They should be.
The relevant question is whether they are prepared to remain better when being better costs something.
A Warning Before November
Voting for a Democrat can be an act of harm reduction while criticizing that Democrat remains an act of survival.
Those positions are not contradictory.
LGBTQ voters are capable of understanding that Amy Acton would likely govern Ohio more humanely than her Republican opponent while also refusing to pretend that her words were harmless.
We are capable of helping prevent a Republican administration without granting Democratic politicians permanent ownership of our votes.
But Democratic leaders should understand the bargain clearly.
If they use transgender people as a shield in 2026—absorbing Republican attacks, conceding the premise and hoping the rest of the campaign can move on—they should expect consequences in 2028.
They should expect primary challenges.
They should expect furious activists.
They should expect young voters to question whether the party’s promises have any durability.
They should expect an organized left that is increasingly unwilling to treat civil rights as a messaging inconvenience.
And they should expect transgender people to remember exactly who stood beside us when doing so was difficult—and who waved from a Pride parade before walking away.
A blue wave may arrive in November.
But if Democrats build it by washing the rainbow out of their coalition, the water will recede before 2028.
And when it does, party leaders should not ask why the people they abandoned were no longer there to hold back the tide.
For the Children With No Safe Adult
There is one more reason I cannot treat Amy Acton’s words as harmless political positioning.
My first attempts to understand my own gender were not met with safety, patience or love. My mother—the person entrusted with protecting me—became the source of my sexual abuse.
I learned early what can happen when a child reveals something about herself that an adult does not understand or refuses to accept. I learned that honesty could be dangerous. I learned that the person society assumes will protect a child may instead become the person that child needs protection from.
Some children have no mother.
Others have a mother who is physically present but emotionally absent, unsafe or cruel.
Some have loving parents who are terrified by what politicians and television commentators tell them about transgender people. Some are being raised in homes where admitting who they are could cost them their family, their housing or their physical safety.
The state cannot replace the parent a child needed.
But it can refuse to become another adult who punishes that child for telling the truth.
Amy Acton has presented herself to Ohio as a physician, a mother and a protector of public health. As governor, she would not govern only children with supportive families, excellent doctors and safe homes. She would govern children whose first attempts to explain themselves are met with ridicule, rejection, violence or abuse.
For some of those children, the governor may become one of the most powerful adults speaking into their lives.
She may become the voice of the motherless.
She may become the voice heard by children who have mothers but have never experienced the safety that word is supposed to promise.
She may become the last adult in the room with the power to tell them that they are not broken, fraudulent or alone.
That is why her words matter.
When Amy Acton calls transgender girls boys, she is not merely expressing a position on athletic eligibility. She is reinforcing the lesson that many vulnerable children are already being taught at home: that what they know about themselves is false, shameful or dangerous.
Governor Acton, those children do not need another adult telling them that their existence is a problem to be managed.
They need someone willing to protect them.
They need a physician who remembers that medical decisions belong to patients, families and doctors.
They need a mother who understands that not every child has been safely mothered.
They need a governor who will not purchase political comfort with their dignity.
A blue wave may arrive in November.
But elections are not only about who wins power. They are about what those seeking power teach frightened children about their place in the world.
Amy Acton must decide what her voice will tell them.
That they are inconvenient.
That they are expendable.
That they must remain hidden to make other people comfortable.
Or that even when their own homes are not safe, their government will not become one more place where telling the truth about themselves is punished.
