Trunks, Trunks, Trunks like the Boys, Boys, Boys

When I was pregnant for the first time, people who know about our family's ties to trans community, and all the trans folk in our life, would ask if we were going to refuse to assign the baby a gender, or use gender-neutral pronouns. "Nope," David would say. "We're going to go with the apparent biological sex. We figure the baby will let us know soon enough if we're wrong."

That was the Lego Savant. His ABS was male, and he's never wanted to be anything else, not seriously. Though, growing up in a family that says things like, "most people who have penises are male," and "most little girls grow up to be women," he did spend some time as a young child considering whether he wanted to grow up male or female. I remember him saying once that he thought he'd be a woman, so he didn't have to worry about shaving or trimming his beard. But that was just a preschooler's partial understanding of how things worked; he's always been comfortably male.

Likewise Word Boy, who came along three years later. Despte that one summer he spent running around in an adorable red a-line dress with a big daisy on the front (in which he never looked the least bit feminine, but only like a sturdy little boy in a daisy dress), his gender and his apparent biological sex have always been comfortably in alignment.

And then the Tiny Tornado came along. Apparently a girl, by the age of three she was insisting on having her hair cut short, and increasingly refusing to wear clothes she identified as being for girls. These days, almost 5, she wears only boy clothes, from her boxer briefs on out, and wears her tighty-curled black hair trimmed close to her head, or in a mohawk. Despite the strength of her feelings about this, she doesn't have a strong grasp on gender in general--she still calls everyone "he," for instance, even if she knows perfectly well the person is female. This is part of the reason we haven't switched pronouns for her; she hasn't asked for it, and doesn't seem to care much at this point.

On the other hand, she almost always identifies as a boy if you ask her, though sometimes she will say, "I'm a girl who wears boy clothes," and once in a great while she will simply say she is a girl. She doesn't usually get upset when people call her either a girl or a boy (I was going to say, "get her gender wrong," and then I realized I wasn't sure what that means--are they wrong when they call her a girl? or when they call her a boy?), but she doesn't like it if I correct someone's use of a male pronoun, so I don't.

If people ask us whether she's a boy or a girl, we defer the question to her. I can tell that some people find this odd, but she is the only one who knows, and she doesn't always give the same answer.

The other day, she brought me last year's swimsuit, a blue tankini. "This is not going to fit me anymore," she said. "And also, it has flowers on it." Then she started marching around, chanting rhythmically, "I want trunks, trunks, trunks, like the boys, boys, boys."

I fretted for about 5 seconds about the possible implications of buying her swim trunks. What if someone figured out she was female-bodied and flipped out about her nipples showing? And then I remembered the existence of rash guard shirts and realized that we could accommodate our culture's ridiculous paranoia about preschool girls' nipples by buying her one of those to go with her swim trunks.

It's been a pretty smooth road so far. A little boy who was as gender-creative as the Tiny Tornado would be having a much harder time of it. She has had a wonderful preschool teacher this year who was very comfortable with our suggestions for how to handle classmates' questions (refer them to the Tiny Tornado for answers!), and has only reported one or two, mostly friendly, conversations with classmates about whether she is a boy or a girl. I thnk it may get harder as she gets older, but I'm not worrying about that yet.

I appreciate the smooth road. I have many friends who are butch lesbians, or female-to-male transgendered people, who have traumatic memories of being forced into skirts as children, and I am glad to be raising this child in this day. I am struck, though, by how often people want to tell me their own story, or stories of children they know, who started out like the Tiny Tornado and grew up into girly-girls. I think, on the one hand, that she simply reminds them of those stories. On the other hand, perhaps they want to reassure me, and themselves, that she will grow up "normal." They don't say, "it's just a phase," but that's what those stories are about: girls going through a phase.

For my own part, I try not to make predictions. She could grow up to be a butch lesbian, or a transsexual man, or one of those interestingly androgynous straight women you meet from time to time, or who the hell knows what? Because one thing that has been clear about the Tiny Tornodo from the very beginning was that she is absolutely committed to pursuing her own path.

Just to be on the safe side, though, I am trying to break myself of the habit of calling her older brothers "the boys." Because it's really not so clear just who "the boys" are.