Tucker Lieberman
2 min readDec 11, 2023

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Perhaps you're right. Perhaps what first caused me to identify as gay and transgender, as a teenager in the 1990s even before I had access to internet, was due to my inability to question anything. My incuriosity was probably also what led me to major in philosophy because I just didn't realize that philosophy involved pondering questions in great detail. I went on for a masters degree in journalism because I didn't have any interest in improving my skills in the "asking questions" department. I've spent a couple decades testing software to look for bugs, writing technical documentation, quality-approving financial transactions that others entered, and interviewing lawyers about the law and court process in their area, not to mention writing a biography of an obscure private person who lived a hundred years ago, because I don't really ever have questions about anything. I've read over 2,000 books cover-to-cover because I like reviewing information I already know. I've published a thousand online articles which would have been greatly improved had they originated with my own questions or had I intended my message to prompt the reader to ask questions of their own. When I moved to a new country six years ago and learned to speak Spanish, I had no questions. This morning, I briefly put aside my search for software bugs and walked down the street to speak to a banker (in Spanish) regarding a particular detail about Colombian banks, but I already knew the answer and so I had more of a comment than a question. At no point in the quarter-century during which I've lived in my post-transition gender, nor at any point in my same-sex marriage, have I really asked any meaningful questions about gender and sexuality. Thanks for pointing out that deficit in my ability to think. Of my thousand articles, I believed I'd devoted 250 to explaining some nuance of what transphobia is and why it's wrong, but maybe my articles about transphobia only mock non-transgender people in a terribly thoughtless manner, in exactly the same way, 250 times over. Maybe those articles should be rewritten and retitled as: "The word 'transphobia' is only used as an insult: This is actually a question? Part [n] of 250." The talk I gave for Medium Day this year was called "Electric Unknowing" but I forgot to talk about the value of questions and instead my remarks casually derailed into leftist mockery. My inability to ask questions reveals me as, essentially, a leftist. Thanks to your comment, I now realize that my entire life has been, from others' perspectives, a "change," one that "may erode social conventions that hold society together," and that all this time I should have been questioning myself (conservatively) and acknowledging the deep value that such conservatism on my part would have brought to society. Had I done so, I would have not lived a gay/trans life and would have been someone who could have brought value to society. Thank you for your comment, which I'm sure you meant not as mockery, but as a question?

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Tucker Lieberman
Tucker Lieberman

Written by Tucker Lieberman

Cult classic. Author of the novel "Most Famous Short Film of All Time." Editor for Prism & Pen and Identity Current. tuckerlieberman.com

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