A few years back, I had a memorable conversation with a fellow parent I’d just met at a local sports meet-up. This was at a time when life was getting back to normal following the end of COVID lockdowns. Personal confidences flowed freely among soccer moms and dads who suddenly had a chance to unburden themselves of months’ worth of accumulated domestic stresses.

My new friend told me that one of his teens had become depressed during the pandemic. After a long period of sullen moping, the teenager eventually learned (from the internet, of course) that society’s oppressive “gender binary” was the source of this psychological downturn—at which point, “they” (as the child would now be self-describing) came out as non-binary.

As regular readers of Quillette may know, I don’t have much time for theories of human identity that presuppose the existence of gendered souls (non-binary or otherwise) within our biologically sexed bodies. But I try to avoid voicing such skepticism during real-world social encounters, lest things get awkward. When others raise the topic on their own initiative, I do my best to stay quiet and just listen.