He was especially hurt that the employee had called him racist after he had tried to accommodate her Muslim faith. He says he arranged for someone to cover for her so she could pray five times a day, and he let her keep her prayer rug in his office. “When she said, ‘You hate me because I’m Muslim,’ I was like, ‘Are you serious?’” he told me. Then he caught himself. “I know it probably wasn’t the right reaction to have.”

The Children’s Aid Society dismissed the accusation, Daniel and his former coworkers said, since the name on the negative review didn’t match the name of any parents, and no children had been pulled from the program, despite what the review implied. (Citing confidentiality rules, the agency declined to discuss the investigation with me.)

When I met up with Daniel, his name had already been cleared. But I wondered, how do you recover from something like that? How do you snap back from the realization that in your chosen field, people will use your gender and sexuality to smear you?

Over the course of many hours of conversation, I noticed something about Daniel that I suspect helps him get through difficult times.

A few years into his preschool career, Daniel went back to school to earn a master’s degree in early-childhood education. Even now that he’s done with his degree, he buries himself in theory, perusing textbooks on everything from Piaget to feminism. He reads about gender norms, goes to conferences to talk about “queering the early years,” and helped organize a workshop for other early-childhood educators on working with LGBTQ populations. He’s interested in how society can stop projecting gender norms onto kids. Perhaps, I thought, he’s learned from personal experience just how painful such prejudices can be.

The more Daniel learned about the theories behind societal stereotypes, the easier it seemed to be for him to process people’s mistrust of him. When a suspicious mom treats him unfairly, he could chalk it up to psychological phenomena, rather than making it about himself.

Daniel has stumbled on a technique psychologists commonly employ to help people maneuver through painful situations: they advise people to view their problems from an outside perspective.

It’s a theory called Solomon’s Paradox, after the biblical king of Israel. According to the Bible, God appeared to Solomon in a dream and asked him what he wanted. Solomon asked for wisdom, so God granted his wish, giving him “a discerning heart.” People traveled great distances to hear Solomon’s sage advice.293 (Most famously, he determined the true mother of a baby by offering to cut the newborn in half—the woman whose child it was would rather give it up than see it die.)