My message to Trump voters is that not everyone who really hated your choice is some kind of socialist revolutionary who hates freedom. Many had real concerns, the same kinds of concerns that Trump voters had, like jobs and health care. A lot of them were genuinely opposed to Trump’s words and behavior.

​To the Biden voters, I’d say that few people who voted against your choice are racists or fascists. Many had real concerns, the same kinds of concerns Biden voters had. They saw your candidate as a threat to things they deeply valued, like religious liberty, with good reason. I’d also say that a lot of people who voted for Biden were absolutely unenthusiastic about him, and he owes his victory to his opponent and not to his own winsomeness.

This conversation comes back to me today, Father’s Day. She and I were really saying many of the same things — but between what we each meant by those things is a very wide gap.

Our talk ended with her in tears. She said she couldn’t help feeling that I was implying her child would somehow be deprived something he needed. That is what I was suggesting.

​But in my mind, the whole time we talked, the main culprit for that deprivation — the only person toward whom I was tempted to feel any real anger or scorn — was that man who would be a “donor” and not a “father.”

This bus is hard to miss: It’s bright orange, emblazoned with a message calculated to garner attention. Figures of a girl and boy, marked “XX” and “XY,” stand beside the words, “Boys are boys […] Girls are girls … and always will be. It’s biology.”

​Aiming to spark renewed discussion over the rush toward transgender rights, the bus launched two Thursdays ago in Manhattan with a small press event. That afternoon, the trip came screeching to a halt. Figuratively, that is: for the bus was parked, when protesters spray-painted the sides with graffiti messages about “trans liberation,” and smashed holes in its windows with a hammer.