For Your Edification: What is a Good-Faith Question?

So, one of the things on my list for this week is to make an appointment to talk to the Tiny Tornado's teacher and principal about TT's gender. I have a very clear agenda for this meeting: making sure they understand that TT is to be treated as a boy, and that under no circumstances are they to disclose his status to other parents or children. I intend to be friendly, but this stuff isn't negotiable. He is starting school as a boy; that's his choice and we're going to honor it.

A couple of people have asked me "what if" questions about this plan. What if he decides, a couple of years down the road, that he isn't a boy? Are we setting him up for trouble if we let him identify as a boy now?

I have a few thoughts about that. One is that, as an anxious person, I have a lot of experience with "what if" thinking, and it's rarely productive.

Also, I don't see that we have much of an option other than to have him start school as a boy. He's very clear about his boyness right now; he's not going to want anyone calling him a girl or using female pronouns. And, as one friend pointed out, his gender presentation is so strongly coded "male" that it could only be harder for people to be trying to think of him as a girl. I had to submit his birth certificate to enroll him, and it says he's female. I think that a box checked on a piece of paper filed away in a drawer in the office is going to fade into insignificance next to the reality of the Tiny Tornado standing right in front of you.

At the same time that I try not to engage in "what if" thinking, I have done enough of it to know we have lots of options if the Tiny Tornado chooses to identify as a girl somewhere down the road. For one thing, being a homeschooling family gives us a lot of power--we're perfectly prepared to homeschool him if school doesn't work out in one way or another. In fact, he wants to homeschool, and right now our best guess is that we will homeschool him after this school year. To be honest, our primary motivation for sending him to Begindergarten (a Young Fives program for kids with summer and fall birthdays who are not ready for Kindergarten) is the free respite care. So "how will he cope in school if X happens?" is not something we worry too much about. I have lots of other things to worry about, and don't have a lot of energy to spare for that particulr one just now.

The summer gathering was very interesting with the Tiny Torndao. It was the first time I've been somewhere with him where lots of people just assumed he was a boy, and there was no tension at all between that and who he "really" is. It felt peaceful.

Of course, lots of people there did know him before, and they seemed to adjust very well. Some of his teachers in Junior Gathering had him last year, and they just cheerfully adapted to the new pronoun. It really is easy when you're face-to-face with him. A couple of years ago, we had an intergenrational retreat at our Quaker meeing, and one of the facilitators kept calling Tiny Tornado "he" even after being corrected several times. Because the evidence of your own eyes is very strong.

But the Gathering was also the first place I've fielded people's questions and comments. I've talked about TT's gender journey on my blog and on Facebook, and it seems that, if some of my readers have doubts or concerns about how we're handling it, they're keeping it to themselves. I've gotten only a mix of silence and positive comments about my writing on the subject. But several people at the Gathering--some of whom had been following his story on-line, and some of whom had just learned about it there--took the opportunity to talk to me about it.

Sometimes this went very well. Sometimes it went...less well.

One friend, who just learned about the new pronouns at the Gathering, expressed her interest in what has to be just about the perfect way: "You must have had quite the journey with the Tiny Tornado this past year. I'd like to hear more about that sometime, if you're comfortable talking about it."

Another friend started by expressing a concern about us making an apparently irrevocable decision based on the wishes of a 4-year-old. That's a little less pleasant, but we ended up having a good talk. She was interested to hear me talk about why we don't see this as irrevocable at all ("Irrevocable? All he's done is wear boys' underwear and ask us to call him He. That can be reversed with a trip to Meijer and the letter S."), and then I talked to her about how we are trying to be very in the moment about stuff--we don't imagine that we know the outcome of this.

At TransHealth Raider and I had opportunities to hear from doctors and psychologists who specialize in treating gender nonconforming children. And, statistically, there is a really good chance that the Tiny Tornado will identify as female when he gets older--maybe a little more than 50%, based on their experience with other kids. We're not holding him to anything. We're just doing what seems best to us right now. And right now, it's clear that he is happiest living as a boy.

So, we talked about that some, and it went really well. This friend had been concerned that we were making a terrible mistake, and I think by the end of our conversation she at least felt that, if we were making a mistake, it was at least a thoughtful mistake and not a reckless one.

Other folks... *sigh*

I've had a few things in my life that people were persistently curious about: our two oldest being conceived with donor sperm; Tiny Tornado's adoption; fat acceptance; homeschooling. Things that people are naturally curious about. I have often wished that people would understand that even perfectly natural curiosity ought to be suppressed sometimes; just being curious doesn't entitle you to information about someone else.

But, since I am generally happy to share my experiences, it's not so much that I wish people would suppress their curiosity as that I wish they would learn two things:

1. To recognize when they don't know much about something, and withhold judgement until they do.

2. To ask actual questions.

One thing you find when you homeschool is that most people don't know much about it, but have very strong opinions anyway, and they want to share these opinions with you. I wish we could all learn to recognize our ignorance, and remedy it before making judgements. But I'm pretty sure that's a pipe dream.

The other thing is that I encountered more than one person who said, "I have a question about the Tiny Tornado," and then went on to talk about their own feelings and "concerns." I am proud of myself that I actually did a good job of getting out of these conversations--I'm not a very direct person but I actually said to two different people, in so many words, "I'm not willing to have this conversation with you," when it became clear that "Can I ask you a question?" was actually code for "May I share my ignorance and judgement with you?"

I always say, "I will answer any good-faith questions about this," whenever any of these kinds of topics come up. "I don't think you're thought about the implications of this down the line," is not a good-faith question. "Kids as young as four don't even understand gender, so I'm concerned that you're making a mistake letting the Tiny Tornado choose" is also not a good-faith question. Nor is, "Don't you think he's just emulating his big brothers?" No, I don't. Clearly you do. But you probably wouldn't think that if you lived in our house.

So, what does a good-faith question look like?

Well, it's not a statement, for one thing. "I'm concerned that..." is almost never actually a good-faith question. It's usually actually a lecture or commentary. If your "question" doesn't end with a question mark, it's not a good-faith question.

A good-faith question should actually ask for information. "Don't you think..." for instance, is also almost never a good-faith question. It's an expression of opinion disguised as a question. It's putting words in my mouth. It's telling me what I should think. It's asking for my agreement with your opinion.

How do you know if you're asking a good-faith question?

Well, one way to think about it is to go back to high school journalism class and the classics: Who, What, Where, Why, When, and How. If you can re-phrase what you want to say so that it begins with one of these words, it's harder to turn it into a statement of your own opinion (not impossible, I'm sure. But harder). Think about how different these sound from the examples I gave above:

"How did you decide to use male pronouns for the Tiny Tornado?"

"Where have you gotten information to help you make these decisions?"

"How do you think you'll handle it if he decides, somewhere down the road, that he is a girl?"

"How are you feeling about all this?"

"What kind of support system do you have as you're dealing with this?

You can fix a "don't you think" bad-faith question by dropping two letters and an apostrophe: "Do you think he's just emulating his big brothers?" is a good-faith question, because it implies the possiblity that I'll say, "No, I don't think that, and here's why."

A good-faith question should reflect the questioner's desire to know more. That's why I loved Peggy's, "I'd like to hear more if you're comfortable talking about it." I'm going to be remembering her as a model when I'm dealing with my own curiosity. Her comment could also be rephrased as, "What has this past year been like for you and the Tiny Tornado?"

See how that works?

I try to be patient with people. Their intentions are generally good; they're watching out for the Tiny Tornado. As I said, their curiosity is perfectly natural. And they are offering me an opportunity, however awkwardly, to share what I know. I found at the Gathering that it was easier to be patient with people now that I've figured out how to be blunt; in the past, I've had a tendency to not recognize my own discomfort, to let other people set the parameters for discussion, to share more than I was comfortable sharing when people approached me this way. Knowing that I can say, "I'm not going to have this conversation," or "That's not really a question. Do you have a question I can answer?" really helps.

Maybe I'll make a little card, "What is a good-faith question?" that I can hand to people. I could say, "I'm not going to have this conversation right now, but I'd be happy to have a different conversation with you after you've read this." A little control-freaky, sure. But also an invitation. Because I really am happy to talk to people about just about anything. If I have reason to think they're actually listening.