I listened to the interview Saturday night, under the covers with David, not sure if I would still like my answers to Piya Chattopadhyay’s questions.

Piya, a Canadian radio personality, hosts a program called “Out in the Open” on CBC Radio, where she explores one topic each week from multiple perspectives. The most recent episode, Whither Gender, includes an interview with me, talking about coming to terms with having a non-binary child.

The show offers a multi-faceted exploration of how we think and talk about a certain gender construct. Is it as complex and complete as it could be? Certainly not. But it’s still excellent. And anyway, that’s not my point.

Piya also interviewed a couple at the opposite end of the parenting journey from David and me. Bobby and Lesley are young parents in New York who chose not to assign their child a gender. They use the pronouns they and them to refer to their toddler. When I checked the CBC website to see if any of the segments had attracted any comments, I found 5 on my interview and 475 on theirs.

475 comments in less than a week?

I saw some supportive remarks, but for the most part, I was appalled. The cruelty. The judgment. The utter disdain. Who were these strangers dismissing the choices these parents had made? The child is loved. In the interview, the father sounds happy, bewildered and exhausted, like any new parent. He sounds sure of himself.

It made me happy to imagine him and his partner confidently raising their child. Parenting is hard. We do the best we can. We make decisions that fit our values and our understanding of the world.

When David and I reflect on the choices we made as young parents – where to live, what schools to send our kids to, how to observe religious holidays, who to bring into our social circle – we feel confident that we made a lot of good choices. We also made a few clumsy ones.

Would we make them all again? Who knows?

Some of the things we thought we understood 20 years ago we now understand differently. But we made those decisions from a place of commitment and love.

Bobby and Lesley are doing what they think is right. And it’s none of our damn business. We don’t get to judge them. Instead, we should be supporting them, welcoming them into the community of parents doing our level best.

I’m reminded of an interview Krista Tippett recently broadcast with poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine. They were talking about race, not gender, but the conversation kept returning to the importance of remaining in community and conversation, of finding ways to engage, even when we disagree or potentially hurt each other with our choices.

Here’s how the On Being website describes the episode:

Claudia Rankine says every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. But she says all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book, Citizen: An American Lyric, catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how it’s possible to bring that reality into the open — not to fight, but to draw closer. And she shows how we can do this with everyone, from our intimate friends to strangers on airplanes.

Near the end of the interview, Rankine, a Yale poetry professor, describes a conversation she had with an Uber driver on the way to a speaking engagement far from the nearest airport. During the two hours they spent in the car together, she finds out that this white, working class woman voted for President Trump, is opposed to Obamacare, and can’t visit her sister over the summer because she has to earn money for repairs to her double-wide trailer before winter.

Here is the end of the conversation:

And then I asked her, what did she do when she wasn’t driving? And she said, “Well, I do theater.” Apparently, there was a church in town, and they had asked for actors, so she comes, and she does theater. All of a sudden, this woman became this whole person — who still would probably vote against my best interests, my life possibilities, and all of that, but was a whole person, with a lot of pain, and was making a life the best she knew how. By the time we arrived, she’s like, “It was great talking with you,” and I was like, “Great talking to you.” But it was a lot — it was one of those moments where — I’m often being driven by people who are not me, and I spend a lot of time thinking about, how can I say this so that we can stay in this car together, and yet, explore the things that I want to explore with you?

How can I say this so that we can stay in this car together?

I wish the people who find Bobby and Lesley’s choice confusing – or even wrong – would give them the benefit of the doubt instead of judging them. I wish they cared more about the conversation, about “staying in this car together” than being right.

Why did I put myself out there on the radio? Why did I make myself so vulnerable? First, because the show’s producers asked. But I also said yes for all the people whose families and friends and communities are judging them. We all live in communities – neighborhoods, families, religious groups. If we don’t support one another, if we make it impossible for some people to comfortably remain in our communities, we diminish the world for everyone.

I hope you’ll listen to the episode. It airs today (January 24) at 1 pm, among other times. Detroiters can listen on the Canadian station, 89.9 today. You can also catch the podcast or listen online any time.