Shaun Dawson (00:07)
Hi, welcome back to Raising Men. I'm your host, Shaun Dawson. And today I've dropped a link in the show notes to a recent episode of a podcast that I like a lot and listen to regularly called The Bulwark Daily. Now, this episode is something that I think every parent listening should check out. Now

Shaun Dawson (00:38)
I wanna be completely honest, right out of the gate. I don't know very many trans people. Maybe I may have met maybe as many as five in my entire life.

Shaun Dawson (00:55)
And I'm nowhere near qualified through my experience to weigh in meaningfully on the broader cultural debate. I I just I don't have much of an opinion. and I don't feel like I've earned one. In fact, it kind of surprises me how many people out there do seem to have very furious rock solid

Shaun Dawson (01:25)
opinions about lives and experiences they've had essentially zero personal exposure to. Maybe it's a lot more common out there than I realize. but it seems to me that people are mostly just popping off on the internet. from where I'm sitting though, I I do feel like walking through the world as

Shaun Dawson (01:54)
A trans person seems like a profoundly rough road to travel. and I think that we owe it to our culture and to our own character, frankly, to extend grace and to recognize that there are real people with real struggles behind that nomenclature.

Shaun Dawson (02:24)
And that we should actually seek to understand somebody's point of view before we pop out on the pop off on the internet, or before, frankly, we even really cultivate an opinion. And it's okay actually to not have an opinion something on something that you're not really all that knowledgeable.

Shaun Dawson (02:48)
Remember that I think one of the core principles of healthy masculinity that we have excavated on this show is that we need to reactively protect as opposed to attack. And we need to bring the temperature down, not up. I think that in a lot of ways

Shaun Dawson (03:16)
We conflate protection with attacking. We think that in order to protect, we need to attack somebody else. And sometimes maybe that's true. If you have an attacker breaking into your home, and you know, in order to protect your family, you might need to engage or, you know, attack that attacker. I think that the vast majority of situations where

Shaun Dawson (03:46)
where, you know, even hostile language or violence is used though are might be misconstrued. And and certainly when you know cultural hot button issues arise, I think that it's you know, I think that people would really benefit from taking a breath and just remembering that

Shaun Dawson (04:16)
You need to just just recognize that we're all human and we all have our own experiences and we can learn from each other's experiences if we just frickin' listen. And modern technology makes that difficult. Social media is not a place where you can engage in thoughtful, meaningful debate. It is a place where you can

Shaun Dawson (04:43)
Virtue signal or vice signal or signal. And you know, you're you're showing the banner, and that's all you're doing. And

Shaun Dawson (04:57)
But, you know, like I said, it is a principle of modern masculinity that we have a we have a bias towards protection. We have a bias to bringing the temperature down. And so maybe think about that before engaging too deeply on this stuff. And but that brings me to this episode of the Bulwork Daily.

Shaun Dawson (05:27)
The episode color covers Julia Curlee and Julia Curlee was the first CIA officer to transition openly.

Shaun Dawson (05:41)
The moment I want to and it's an interesting story and worth listening to by our own right, by its own right, and and Julia's story is is is very good and it's very interesting and it's worth paying attention to and it's an opportunity to kind of walk through her shoes a little bit. But the moment I want to call attention to involves former vice president Mike Pense. Curly was assigned

Shaun Dawson (06:10)
To give Mike Pense his daily briefing. And that that's a real heavy responsibility for somebody. It requires somebody who's very skilled and and careful. You end up having to wake up in the middle of the night and start gathering all the intel, and your job is to summarize it into a meaningful but time.

Shaun Dawson (06:40)
compressed briefing that the principal can then drill down into and and you kind of have to like be an expert on everything that's going on in the entire world and have your fingertips on all of that information because and and you know the way that she describes what it was like giving those briefings to Pense he

Shaun Dawson (07:09)
cared deeply. He w you know, he wasn't just waving it off. He was he he would drill down he was a pro.

Shaun Dawson (07:19)
But it's worth pointing out that politically speaking, Pense holds views that are openly skeptical and hostile to trans rights. And here Curlee is a trans woman working directly for him. And I can understand how there might be friction there, but there wasn't. Pense didn't treat her like a political pawn. He didn't vilify her.

Shaun Dawson (07:46)
He didn't take the opportunity to score political points with his base by pointing out or by, you know, dismissing her or or anything like that. He also didn't take the opportunity. If he were of the other party, he wouldn't have taken the opportunity to score points with his political base by calling attention to the fact that he employed a trans person. He just dealt with her on a professional level.

Shaun Dawson (08:16)
Whatever misgivings he might have had about her situation based on his own personal position and morality or religion or whatever, they weren't relevant to their working relationship. It was a meritocracy in the true sense of the word. What mattered

Shaun Dawson (08:40)
was excellence. And she brought that, even though she brought enough excellence.

Shaun Dawson (08:49)
That Pense requested that she carry on after her tour was up.

Shaun Dawson (08:57)
And when the opportunity presented itself, as he was kind of on the way out the door and Curley's mom was introduced to the vice president

Shaun Dawson (09:09)
He treated Curlee with dignity and with honor. And he took the time to tell Curly's mother that that she should be proud of her daughter. And it was a meaningful moment, for Curlee because she'd sort of reached the pinnacle of her career. She

Shaun Dawson (09:28)
You know, she had dreamed of being a CIA officer when she was younger. It's a beautiful story. I and it's worth you know a and and she also dreamed of being a woman. And this was kind of a moment that brought those two things together for her. And I I can't imagine what that's like.

Shaun Dawson (09:50)
Listen to the episode and and hear the story from Curly hisself herself. you'll be doing me a favor.

Shaun Dawson (10:02)
But one of the things I want to call attention to is the way that Pense comported himself. that I think is kind of part of a blueprint for modern healthy masculinity. And I I think that there are some vital lessons that are in that that we can bring to our boys. First of all, you can hold deep personal convictions. Pense obviously does. He's been very public about it. He's been very clear about it.

Shaun Dawson (10:31)
He's had a lifetime in public service where he's been really, really clear what his personal convictions are. And you can hold those without victimizing people, without demeaning people, without dehumanizing.

Shaun Dawson (10:46)
And I I also think that you need to you need the humility

Shaun Dawson (10:53)
To hold space in your head for the possibility that you don't have the full picture. Or that you actually might be wrong about something. And that, you know, we talk about the Sherlock brain versus the Conan brain. That's the Sherlock brain. That's thoughtful. It's regulating, it's regulated, it's strategic. And it overrides that impulsive Conan brain that just wants to swing a club at anything it finds unfamiliar.

Shaun Dawson (11:24)
And I'll also point out that historically the forces in this world that seek to dehumanize others never re never seem to move society forward.

Shaun Dawson (11:50)
And history never shrouds the people that participate with those movements in honor.

Shaun Dawson (11:58)
Now it used to be the case that you could kind of hide behind the anonymity in the crowd of a crowd. But now through social media we all have a direct channel. And everything our boys say and do is written and the permanent record. And it will be it will be analyzed in a time that is foreign to the one we're in now. And now

Shaun Dawson (12:25)
You know, that could make you timid. It could make you just not express opinions at all, and that would be a shame. And in fact, I think the forces, you know, some of the the the the kind of evil forces in our culture are trying to make that happen. They're trying to get people to not speak up with what they really believe. And you should speak up with what you really believe.

Shaun Dawson (12:51)
But you also owe it to yourself to make sure that you really believe something that is in alignment with your values. And that means that you have to have good values and you have to know what they are. And it does mean that we need to be careful. We need we need to teach our boys to think through the long-term implications of their philosophies, to take the other side, to

Shaun Dawson (13:16)
Yeah, to to remember that no matter what the topic, that there is a real human being on the other side of that screen, and a real human being on the other side of the debate.

Shaun Dawson (13:30)
And that person might be directly affected by their words and their actions. They might be contributing to to something that they'll regret they contributed to in five or ten or twenty years time.

Shaun Dawson (13:51)
And the basic rule of thumb here is default to protection, default to humility, default to grace, and default.

Shaun Dawson (14:02)
To humanizing people. And if you see someone trying to dehumanize people, they're they're up to something. It's a grift kind of. And what they're trying to do is turn a group of people into a a faceless other. And that historically has ended in ways that we're not proud of as a species.

Shaun Dawson (14:31)
So give that some thought. So please do me a favor. I'll consider it a personal favor if you go listen to that episode. And remember that you are a great parent.