Never Swim Alone

What is our collective finish line?

A note for the non-swimmers: A length is a wall-to-wall swim, a lap is wall and back. 

My three pool rules as a swim teacher: do not drink the pool water, do not pee in the pool, and never swim alone. Even a lifelong swimmer like me knows the deceptive allure of a solo swim. Solitude is a pleasure, but loneliness is a dangerous current.

I begin each lap submerged, sinking into the cool embrace, legs finding purchase against the tiled wall. My first length is often underwater, a brief rebellion against breath-holding rules. I used to conquer a whole lap on a single breath, a youthful recklessness now tempered. It's a metaphor for those early days, that naive belief in a quick victory.

Underwater, I'm enveloped by silence and the water's touch, alone but not lonely. A world I sometimes wish I could inhabit permanently. Then, the strokes begin: breaststroke, crawl, backstroke, butterfly—each a story I could teach. My lap swims have three destinations: time, distance, or exhaustion.

Time swims are simple: set the watch, swim until the alarm. Distance swims are about the goal, the yards stretching out like the miles I'm trying to cover in this fight. Kansas this month, all 50 states by 2027—each stroke a petition, each breath a demand to protect children from the tidal wave of "gender affirmation." Each kick a protest against the erasure of "lesbian" and "gay" as identities, swallowed by the insatiable maw of "trans." But it's the third swim, the swim to exhaustion, that haunts me. 

What's our collective finish line? 

It's a mental game more than physical, a search for that runner's high—that place of presence and absence, of effortless power and serene clarity. Harder to find in the pool, where breath is a conscious choice, a controlled release and intake. Just like breathing is a conscious choice for these kids, manipulated by adults with agendas.

Pushing limits, whether physical or social, requires knowing when enough is enough. When to say, "I've reached my distance." But the pull to go further, to override the burning muscles and gasping lungs, is strong. The pull to protect these kids is stronger.

I see swimmers enter the pool of this movement. Some only test the water, daunted by the depths of medicalization, the irreversible surgeries, the lifelong consequences of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Some sprint a single lap, convinced a quick fix exists—a single article, a viral tweet, a well-placed protest. They don't understand the insidious nature of the ideology, the way it has infiltrated schools, hospitals, and even families.

But the distance swimmers, they're the ones I seek. They understand the long game, the solitary nature of the fight, the camaraderie of shared lanes and whispered encouragements. They see the coordinated effort to redefine "gay" as "trans," to convince vulnerable kids that their same-sex attraction is a symptom of a hidden transgender identity. They see the way gender ideology preys on kids who don't fit in, offering them a seemingly simple solution to complex social and emotional issues.

But my finish line… If this began with kids like me, kids who felt different, where does it end? Does it end with more clinical trials, more experiments on "proto-gay" children, now rebranded as "gender non-conforming"? How do we cure a disease we've never defined, a "gender identity" that shifts and changes with the cultural winds? How do we fight an enemy that cloaks itself in the language of compassion and care, while systematically dismantling the hard-won rights of women and the very concept of biological sex?

My distance might be unreachable. 

It's a world where my love isn't "weird," where gut-level homophobia, often masked as trans activism, is finally acknowledged and confronted. It's a world where "lesbian" and "gay" aren't dirty words, replaced by trendy new labels designed to obscure the reality of same-sex attraction. It's a world where kids are allowed to be kids, to explore without the pressure to conform to rigid gender stereotypes, without the threat of medicalization hanging over their heads.

I'll swim the globe if I have to. I have the skill, the pace, and a small band of comrades who know the distance may be infinite, who know some will drop out along the way, disillusioned by the long road. 

Maybe there's no final destination, only a truce. But it always comes back to the kids, the ones I was, the ones I see. Can we at least give them freedom? Not just freedom from bullying, but freedom from being "transed," too. Freedom to just be kids.