Staying silent when activists and politicians insist “trans women are women” has real world consequences for real women. The truth is, trans women are biologically male and they should be treated with dignity, love and respect. But many trans activists insist on language that erases the reality of biological women. Their desire to transcend biology, no matter how heartfelt, does not, and cannot, require me to lie or teach a generation of children a falsehood.

When I signed my two eldest children up for their COVID-19 vaccines, I filled out online medical forms which asked me what their “sex assigned at birth” was, as if some cavalier doctor had jumped the gun and carelessly assigned a sex to my three sons and daughter. I have three male and one female children and that is a biological reality that can’t be changed.

Defending that reality, refusing to let myriad lies about sex gain the shimmer of truth, is now a risky act of defiance. But it is also, for me, an act of love and protection.

Girls and young women are being swept up in a social contagion which has them believing they are men. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, in which young women with no early childhood expression of gender dysphoria suddenly identify as trans, has spiked in the last decade. “We have a hundred-year diagnostic history of [gender dysphoria], and it always began in early childhood and was overwhelmingly male,” reports Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage, and yet now, there is a 4,000 percent increase in U.K. gender clinic referrals, and they are overwhelmingly for females. And here in the U.S., double mastectomies for gender dysphoric teens as young as 13 is on the rise.