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      Dear Elites (of Both Parties), the People Will Take It From Here, Thanks

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      I first learned about the opioid crisis three presidential elections ago, in the fall of 2011. I was the domestic policy director for Mitt Romney’s campaign and questions began trickling in from the New Hampshire team: What’s our plan?By then, opioids had been fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in American history for years. I am ashamed to say I did not know what they were. Opioids, as in opium? I looked it up online. Pills of some kind. Tell them it’s a priority, and President Obama isn’t working. That year saw nearly 23,000 deaths from opioid overdoses nationwide.I was no outlier. America’s political class was in the final stages of self-righteous detachment from the economic and social conditions of the nation it ruled. The infamous bitter clinger and “47 percent” comments by Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney captured the atmosphere well: delivered at private fund-raisers in San Francisco in 2008 and Boca Raton in 2012, evincing disdain for the voters who lived in between. The opioid crisis gained more attention in the years after the election, particularly in 2015, with Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s research on deaths of despair.Of course, 2015’s most notable political development was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign launch and subsequent steamrolling of 16 Republican primary opponents committed to party orthodoxy. In the 2016 general election he narrowly defeated the former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who didn’t need her own views of Americans leaked: In public remarks, she gleefully classified half of the voters who supported Mr. Trump as “deplorables,” as her audience laughed and applauded. That year saw more than 42,000 deaths from opioid overdoses.In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Former Spouses Discuss Co-Parenting and Being the Best of Friends

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      “We genuinely like each other,” Alex Yaroslavsky said of his ex-wife and co-parent, Liza Cooper. They even live in the same apartment building.In Unhitched, couples tell the stories of their relationships, from romance to vows to divorce to life afterward.Liza Cooper and Alex Yaroslavsky, both from New York City, met in their late 30s, in March 2007, through a dating app; they married about a year later. Both secular Jews, the two seemed compatible on paper, yet differences in their communication styles sometimes created conflict and ultimately brought an end to their marriage.But with patience, work and a sympathetic landlord, the two managed to become dear friends and co-parents after their divorce. They now live on different floors of the same Upper West Side apartment building.Dates of marriage June 15, 2008 to Dec. 13, 2018Age when married Ms. Cooper was 37; Mr. Yaroslavsky was 38. (They are now 53 and 54.)Current occupations She is an administrator in a hospital and a dating coach; he is an executive coach with his own company.Children One son, age 14.Where did they grow up? In 1980, Mr. Yaroslavsky, an only child, immigrated to the United States with his parents when he was 10. The family had lived in Lviv, which was then part of the Soviet Union and is now Ukraine. He quickly learned English.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are You Having a Millennial Mom Midlife Crisis?

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      Mothers have been exhausted since the beginning of time, but some difficulties are specific to the millennial generation.There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” — who hadn’t picked up when the school called — “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”In that moment, said Dr. Casares, the author of “Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be,” she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.”It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer moms didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X moms had to prove that they could do everything men could do — and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal.And then came millennial moms, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and ’90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritize careers and other times because — with student debt and less wealth than previous generations — it felt impossible not to.Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favor. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Government Bans on Social Media Endanger Speech Rights

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      My entire life I’ve seen a similar pattern. Older generations reflect on the deficiencies of “kids these days,” and they find something new to blame. The latest technology and new forms of entertainment are always bewitching our children. In my time, I’ve witnessed several distinct public panics over television, video games and music. They’ve all been overblown.This time, however, I’m persuaded — not that smartphones are the sole cause of increasing mental health problems in American kids, but rather that they’re a prime mover in teen mental health in a way that television, games and music are not. No one has done more to convince me than Jonathan Haidt. He’s been writing about the dangers of smartphones and social media for years, and his latest Atlantic story masterfully marshals the evidence for smartphones’ negative influence on teenage life.At the same time, however, I’m wary of government intervention to suppress social media or smartphone access for children. The people best positioned to respond to their children’s online life are parents, not regulators, and it is parents who should take the lead in responding to smartphones. Otherwise, we risk a legal remedy that undermines essential constitutional doctrines that protect both children and adults.I don’t want to minimize the case against phones. Haidt’s thesis is sobering:Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected.The consequences, Haidt argues, have been dire. Children — especially teenagers — are suffering from greater rates of anxiety and depression, and suicide rates have gone up; and they spend less time hanging out with friends, while loneliness and friendlessness are surging.Neither smartphones nor social media are solely responsible for declining teen mental health. The rise of smartphones correlates with a transformation of parenting strategies, away from permitting free play and in favor of highly managed schedules and copious amounts of organized sports and other activities. The rise of smartphones also correlates with the fraying of our social fabric. Even there, however, the phones have their roles to play. They provide a cheap substitute for in-person interaction, and the constant stream of news can heighten our anxiety.I’m so convinced that smartphones have a significant negative effect on children that I’m now much more interested in the debate over remedies. What should be done?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Does Everyone Want to Be on the ‘Mommy Track’?

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      When I caught up recently with Liz Koelsch, one of the moms that my friend Jessica Bennett profiled for our 2021 “primal scream” project — a look at motherhood during the pandemic’s peak — a lot had changed in her life. In the four years since Covid-19 was declared a national emergency, Koelsch, who was a single mom when we first met her, got married to a great guy. She completed an associate degree in paralegal studies. And she’s finally happy at work because she has moved to a job that is mostly remote and her boss is “all about time flexibility.”“I switched jobs so many times during Covid. I think I had five jobs because they just weren’t working for what was going on in my personal life,” Koelsch told me. Now, she works four days from home, one day in the office, and her life is manageable. “I can throw a load of laundry” in and “on my 15 minute break I can start soup and it’s ready by dinnertime. It’s this whole great way of living. I don’t want to give it up.” She and her new husband are trying for a child together. Remote work, and Washington State’s paid family and medical leave program, will make having another kid possible for her.When I followed up with a bunch of parents whom The Times heard from in 2020 and 2021 to find out how they’re faring these days, two topics came up most frequently. One was the negative effect of the increased volatility and outrageous expense of child care (which I wrote about on Wednesday). The other was a new flexibility, for many, around work. Parents who have increased opportunities to work remotely, or even just managers who are more understanding about their caregiving commitments, told me that these were largely positive changes in their lives.Reading through the responses of parents who said that more flexible work situations had improved their lives made me realize that a lot of the framing of the return-to-office discourse has missed the point. I’ve seen a fair number of headlines over the past few years like this one, “WFH Goes From New Path to Dead End for Working Mothers,” and this one, “‘You Are Mommy Tracked to the Billionth Degree,’” suggesting that for ambitious moms, working from home is a mistake.But while it may be more challenging for some moms to advance if they choose to work from an office less frequently (though I’m optimistic that will change over time as remote work is normalized), what I’m hearing these days from many mothers — and fathers — is that climbing the ladder is not top of mind. With those mommy-track headlines, it’s also worth remembering that working remotely isn’t just a corporate mom thing. While college-educated mothers of young children are more likely to work remotely than other college-educated women, “Looking narrowly at just college graduates, remote work patterns for women and men look more evenly distributed, with men slightly more likely to work remotely than women,” according to an analysis by my newsroom colleagues Ben Casselman, Emma Goldberg and Ella Koeze.The idea of being “mommy tracked” also sets up and cements a false binary: You’re either going straight to the top as fast as possible or you’re going to stagnate forever. More and more, parents are rejecting the notion that this is the only way to think about their work-life balance, particularly while their kids are young. They’re more concerned about having jobs that allow them to both make ends meet and still have the time and energy to enjoy their families.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jennifer Crumbley’s Conviction Offers New Legal Tactic in Mass Shooting Cases

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      The guilty verdict in Michigan against the mother of a school shooter will reverberate in prosecutors’ offices around the country. But don’t expect a flood of similar cases, experts say.The guilty verdict on Tuesday against the mother of a Michigan teenager who murdered four students in 2021 in the state’s deadliest school shooting is likely to ripple across the country’s legal landscape as prosecutors find themselves weighing a new way to seek justice in mass shootings.But, legal experts say, don’t expect a rush of similar cases.“I have heard many people say they think a guilty verdict in this case will open the floodgates to these kinds of prosecutions going forward,” said Eve Brensike Primus, a law professor at the University of Michigan. “To be honest, I’m not convinced that’s true.”That’s because prosecutors in Michigan had notably compelling evidence against the mother, Jennifer Crumbley — including text messages and the accounts of a meeting with school officials just hours before the shooting at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021 — that jurors felt proved she should have known the mental state of her son, Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time.Ethan pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ms. Crumbley was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each student her son killed. She faces a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, and sentencing is scheduled for April 9.Ms. Crumbley’s husband, James Crumbley, 47, will be tried separately in March.“Could more prosecutors file charges emboldened by this kind of ruling and the verdict?” Professor Primus said. “Sure. Do I think they will be successful around the country getting charges to stick if they don’t have the requisite facts that can demonstrate real knowledge? No.”Still, Professor Primus and other legal experts who have followed the case say the successful prosecution of Ms. Crumbley, 45, provides a template for prosecutors around the country to pursue similar cases.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Parenting: A ‘Wonderful and Challenging Adventure’

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      More from our inbox:Aligning Election Calendars to Increase TurnoutNatural Gas ExportsEmbracing the Semicolon Illustration by Frank Augugliaro/The New York Times. Photographs by Getty Images/iStockphotoTo the Editor:I was moved by “I Wrote Jokes About How Parenting Stinks. Then I Had a Kid,” by Karen Kicak (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 25).I have marveled at my child and couldn’t bring myself to complain about night waking or tantrums. I stayed quiet at birthday parties when parents lamented missing out on adult time and said they wanted to get away from their children. I felt so proud of my daughter and wanted to be around her all the time, yet I learned to push that part down.Ms. Kicak is right that when we downplay our parenting skills and our child’s greatness we rob ourselves of joy.Our self-effacing language may be an attempt to cover up how proud we actually are of our kids. We may also be preemptively self-critical to avoid feeling judged by other parents.These insecurities are getting in the way of celebrating together, and Ms. Kicak reminds us what we need to hear, that we’re “doing great.” She calls us to nudge the pendulum back so we can balance the real challenges of parenting with its tender and fleeting glow.Maybe we could connect more deeply if we allowed ourselves to communicate the parts of ourselves that love being a parent, too. I hope we can, before our little ones grow up.Elaine EllisSan FranciscoThe writer is a school social worker.To the Editor:Many thanks to Karen Kicak for her essay about parenting and positivity. When I was in sleep-deprived chaos with two small children, my neighbor, a public school art teacher and artist, asked how I was doing. I replied, “Surviving,” and she replied, “Ah, well, I think you are thriving.” That kind comment made me look at all the good things going on and made a world of difference.I too make only positive comments to parents. Thank you again for reminding people that kind and reassuring words go a long way in helping parents feel confident and supported by their community.Angel D’AndreaCincinnatiTo the Editor:I appreciate Karen Kicak’s piece about our culture’s overemphasis on the negatives of being a parent. It goes along with the focus on children’s “bad behaviors,” as people define them, which parents use to shame and ridicule their kids, even though they are still developing into who they will become. As if children are bad people all the time.Life is good and bad, easy and hard. So is motherhood. Why not note the deepest joys of this remarkable, intimate relationship alongside recognition of how hard it can be? We owe that to mothers. Admiring the love and care and pleasures and new identities that motherhood offers does not have to negate how hard it can get at times.I tell parents, “Enjoy this wonderful and challenging adventure of parenthood.” It is both of those things.Tovah P. KleinNew YorkThe writer is the director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development and the author of “How Toddlers Thrive.”Aligning Election Calendars to Increase Turnout Carl Iwasaki/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “A New Law Will Help Bolster Voting in New York,” by Mara Gay (Opinion, Dec. 27):For every one person who votes in the mayoral general election, two vote in the presidential election. That’s a statistic that should concern anyone who cares about our local democracy.Last month, New York took a big step toward addressing this when Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation moving some local elections to even-numbered years. Aligning local races with federal or statewide races that typically see higher voter turnout will increase voter participation, diversify our electorate and save taxpayer dollars.Los Angeles held its first election in an even-numbered year in November 2022 and saw voter turnout nearly double. Other cities that have made the move have seen similar turnout gains. Research shows that this reform helps narrow participation gaps, particularly among young voters and in communities of color.Unfortunately, the New York State Legislature cannot shift all elections on its own, but lawmakers have committed to passing more comprehensive legislation through a constitutional amendment that moves local elections to even years across the entire state. That would include municipal elections in New York City.Good government groups must continue to advocate this reform, which would create an elections calendar that better serves voters and strengthens our local democracy.Betsy GotbaumNew YorkThe writer is the executive director of Citizens Union and a former New York City public advocate.Natural Gas ExportsA Venture Global liquefied natural gas facility on the Calcasieu Ship Channel in Cameron, La. The company wants to build a new export terminal at the site.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Decision on Natural Gas Project Will Test Biden’s Energy Policy” (front page, Dec. 27):The Biden administration has a choice to make on climate policy: achieve its policy goal or continue to rubber-stamp gas export terminals. Rarely in politics is a choice so straightforward. In this case, it is.It’s simple. The fossil fuel industry is marketing liquefied natural gas (L.N.G.) as “natural.” It’s a “transition fuel,” they say. It’s not. It’s mostly methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases. The gas may emit less smoke and particulate matter than coal, but exporting it causes more greenhouse gas emissions.One of the latest reports on U.S. gas exports by Jeremy Symons says that “current U.S. L.N.G. exports are sufficient to meet Europe’s L.N.G. needs.” So why approve more plants? In the same report, it’s also revealed that if the administration approves all of the industry’s proposed terminals, U.S.-sourced L.N.G. emissions would be larger than the greenhouse gas emissions from the European Union.How can we add another emitter of greenhouse gases — one that would be a bigger contributor than Europe! — and meet the administration’s climate goals? We can’t.It’s time to embrace science, stop listening to the industry’s marketers and say “no, thank you!” to more gas.Russel HonoréBaton Rouge, La.The writer is the founder and head of the Green Army, an organization dedicated to finding solutions to pollution.Embracing the Semicolon Ben WisemanTo the Editor:Re “Our Semicolons, Ourselves,” by Frank Bruni (Opinion, Dec. 25):I feel like Frank Bruni when he writes about how he prattles on “about dangling participles and the like.” My students must also “hear a sad evangelist for a silly religion.”In more than three decades as a writing professor, I require my students to read my seven-page mini-stylebook, “Candy Schulman’s Crash Course in Style.” My mentor used to chastise me in red capital letters in the margins of my essays. “Between You and I?” he’d write; finally, I metamorphosed from “I” to “me.”Notice the semicolon I just used? I love them, like Abraham Lincoln, who respected this “useful little chap.”Kurt Vonnegut, however, felt differently. “Do not use semicolons,” he said. They represent “absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”Until the day I retire, I will continue to teach my students that proper writing is not texting — where capitalization, punctuation and attention to spelling are discouraged.As colleges de-emphasize the humanities, I’ll still be preaching from the whiteboard of my classroom, drawing colons and semicolons to differentiate them, optimistically conveying my joy for proper grammar. Between you and me, I’m keeping the faith.Candy SchulmanNew YorkThe writer is a part-time associate writing professor at The New School. More

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      A Midwestern Republican Stands Up for Trans Rights

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      As 2023 slouches to an ignominious end, some news came Friday that gave me an unexpected jolt of hope. I have spent much of the year watching with horror and trying to document an unrelenting legal assault on queer and trans people. Around 20 states have passed laws restricting access to gender-affirming care for trans and nonbinary people, and several have barred transgender and nonbinary people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.So it was shocking — in a good way, for once — to hear these words from Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, as he vetoed a bill that would have banned puberty blockers and hormones and gender-affirming surgeries for trans and nonbinary minors in Ohio and blocked transgender girls and women from participating in sports as their chosen gender:“Were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most — the parents,” DeWine said in prepared remarks. “Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us, none of us, should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions.”DeWine, by situating his opposition to the bill on the chosen battlefield of far-right activists — parents’ rights — was tapping into an idiom that is at once deeply familiar to me and yet has almost entirely disappeared from our national political discourse: that of a mainstream, Midwestern Republican. It is a voice I know well because it is one I heard all my life from my Midwestern Republican grandparents.I did not agree with all of their beliefs, especially as I got older. But I understood where they were coming from. My grandfather, a belly gunner in the Pacific Theater in World War II, believed a strong military was essential to American security. My grandmother was a nurse, and she believed that science, medicine and innovation made America stronger. They made sure their children and grandchildren went to college — education was a crucial element of their philosophy of self-reliance. And above all, they believed the government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as humanly possible. This last belief, in individual freedom and individual responsibility, was the bedrock of their politics.And so I am not surprised that defeats keep coming for anti-transgender activists. At the ballot box, hard-right candidates in swing states have tried to persuade voters with lurid messaging about children being subjected to grisly surgeries and pumped full of unnecessary medications. But in race after race, the tactic has failed.Legally, the verdict has been more mixed, which is unsurprising given how politically polarized the judiciary has become. This week a federal judge in Idaho issued a preliminary ruling that a ban on transgender care for minors could not be enforced because it violated the children’s 14th Amendment rights and that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.” The state is expected to appeal the decision.In June, a federal court blocked an Arkansas ban on gender-affirming care for minors. “The evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients,” the ruling said, “and that, by prohibiting it, the state undermined the interests it claims to be advancing” of protecting children and safeguarding medical ethics. In 2021, Asa Hutchinson, then the governor, had vetoed the ban for reasons similar to DeWine, but the Arkansas Legislature overrode his veto. (The Ohio Legislature also has a supermajority of Republicans and may decide to override DeWine’s veto.)In other states, like Texas and Missouri, courts have permitted bans to go into effect, forcing families to make very difficult decisions about whether to travel to receive care or move to a different state altogether. The issue seems destined to reach the Supreme Court soon. The A.C.L.U. has asked the Supreme Court to hear its challenge to the care ban in Tennessee on behalf of a 15-year-old transgender girl. Given how swiftly and decisively the court moved to gut abortion rights, it seems quite possible that the conservative supermajority could choose to severely restrict access to transgender health care for children or even adults.But maybe not. After all, the overturning of Roe has deeply unsettled the country, unleashing a backlash that has delivered unexpected victories to Democrats and abortion-rights advocates. Ohio voters just chose by a wide margin to enshrine the right to end a pregnancy in the state Constitution.This is why I think DeWine’s veto speaks to a much bigger truth: Americans simply do not want the government making decisions about families’ private medical care. Polling on abortion finds a wide array of views on the morality of ending a pregnancy at various points up to viability, but one thing is crystal clear: Large majorities of Americans believe that the decision to have an abortion is none of the government’s business.Rapidly changing norms around gender have many people’s heads spinning, and I understand how unsettling that can be. Gender is one of the most basic building blocks of identity, and even though gender variations of many kinds have been with us for millenniums, the way these changes are being lived out feel, to some people, like a huge disruption to their way of life. Even among people who think of themselves as liberal or progressive, there has been a sense that gender-affirming care has become too easily accessible, and that impressionable children are making life-changing decisions based on social media trends.It has become a throwaway line in some media coverage of transgender care in the United States that even liberal European countries are restricting care for transgender children. But this is a misleading notion. No democracy in Europe has banned, let alone criminalized, care, as many states have done in the United States. What has happened is that under increasing pressure from the right, politicians in some countries have begun to limit access to certain kinds of treatments for children through their socialized health systems, in which the government pays for care and has always placed limits on what types are available. In those systems, budgetary considerations have always determined how many people will be able to get access to treatments.But private care remains legal and mostly accessible to those who can afford it.Republicans are passing draconian laws in the states where they have total control, laws that could potentially lead to parents being charged with child abuse for supporting their transgender children or threaten doctors who treat transgender children with felony convictions. These statutes have no analog in free Europe, but they have strong echoes of laws in Russia, which is increasingly criminalizing every aspect of queer life. These extreme policies have no place in any democratic society.Which brings me back to my Midwestern Republican grandparents, Goldwater and Reagan partisans to their core. My grandfather died long before Donald Trump ran for president, and 2016 was the first presidential election in which my grandmother did not vote for the Republican candidate. But she did not vote for Hillary Clinton, choosing another candidate she declined to name to me. Like a lot of Republicans, she really didn’t like Clinton, and one of the big reasons was her lifelong opposition to government health care. She didn’t want government bureaucrats coming between her and her doctors, she told me.I think many, many Americans agree with that sentiment. Transgender people are no different. They don’t want government bureaucrats in their private business.“I’ve been saying for years that trans people are a priority for enemies and an afterthought to our friends,” Gillian Branstetter, a strategist who works on transgender issues at the A.C.L.U., told me. “I’ve made it my job to try and help people understand that transgender rights are human rights, not just because transgender people are human people, but because the rights we’re fighting for are grounded in really core democratic principles, like individualism and self-determination.”Those are core American values, but 2024 is an election year, and even though transphobia has proved to be a loser at the ballot box, many Republicans are sure to beat that drum anyway. Mike DeWine has me hoping that some Republicans will remember what was once a core principle of their party, and embrace the simple plain-spoken truth of my heartland forebears: Keep the government out of my life, and let me be free to live as I choose.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More