Please Forward

Raider and I have been through gender transition with enough people that the process feels familiar. When Tiny Tornado asked us to use male pronouns back in May, we had a pretty good idea how it would play out: you start out using the new pronoun and it feels a little strange. You slip a lot. Gradually the new pronoun starts to feel more comfortable and the slips get less common--I'd say at this point I'm slipping less than once a week, for instance, usually when I'm tired. Eventually, the new pronouns feel so natural and right that the old pronouns start to feel wrong. Even more eventually, it gets hard to remember using the old pronouns, to imagine that person being the old gender. I've already had a taste of this--the other day I came across some photos of the Tiny Tornado from just a few days before he finally talked me into cutting his hair short. It's right around his third birthday. He's wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hand-me-down red t-shirt from his older brothers; it has a lizard on it. Only the sloppy puff I've pulled his hair into on the top of his head suggests that he is a girl.

Already these photos looks odd to me. At the time, he looked to me like a beautiful little girl in jeans. Today I see my beautiful boy, and wonder why it took me so long to cut his hair after he started asking me to do it.


Here is how he looked just a few days later:



Now the Tiny Tornado has asked us to use a new name for him, because he became worried that his name might make people think he's a girl. His name is uncommon; it's a Russian girl's name, and people here don't seem to pick up on its gendered-ness. But he prefers for now that we use a shorter version of it, just in case, and, with his teacher's cooperation, he'll be starting school under the new name next week.

So we've started this process again. It tends to go much like the pronouns. Eventually the old name so completely loses meaning that you almost forget about it. One time when we were trying to think of baby names, I said, "How about Margaret?" and Raider looked at me with one eyebrow up. "Are you serious?" he said.

"Sure," I said. "It's a nice name."

Raider said, "It's also so-and-so's former name, from before his gender transition."

Honestly, although I had called this dear friend by that name for many years before his transition, saying it hadn't called up any associations with him ten years later. In our experience, that's how the mind works. It does an extraordinary job of forgetting.

We call the stage we're in right now with TT's name "the mail-forwarding stage." Uncle Toots coined that term a long time ago, and it's the period when the change hasn't become automatic, when your brain has to pause as it tries to access the new name or pronoun. Your brain goes to "she," sees the forwarding order, and produces "he." And you can feel it happen, like a stutter or a pause. One so short that the people you're talking to probably don't notice it, at least not most of the time. But you do.

The new name has become automatic when the mail-forwarding stage ends.

The most hilarious part of the mail-forwarding stage is that your brain starts checking to see if other names and pronouns need to be forwarded as well. You call non-trans friends by the wrong pronoun from time to time as the system over-corrects. When one close friend was transitioning a decade or so ago, I was once stopped dead because I suddenly couldn't remember whether one of my closest friends--a non-trans woman, as I know perfectly well--should be referred to as "he" or "she." Tiny little postal workers in my brain were dashing around chaotically, running back and forth between stations, flipping through piles of memos, trying to find the paperwork. I was frozen and stammering for a moment until they got it sorted out.

The first syllable of the Tiny Tornado's name and the first syllable of Raider's name end with the same consonant. Raider strongly prefers to use his full name--think Michael instead of Mike, Christopher instead of Chris, Daniel instead of Dan. I know this perfectly well. I have called him by his full name for the duration of our relationship. I have never called him Mike, Chris, or Dan.

Except in the last few days when, primed by my efforts to call the Tornado "Torn," I have also been calling him "Raid." He'd be cranky about it except that he knows it's just an error caused by an overloaded mail network and the coincidence of consonants, and it will pass.

You may wonder if I ever feel sad about the Tiny Tornado's gender. Once in awhile, I do. I feel particularly sad about the dress Word Boy is wearing in the picture below, a dress he chose for himself at the consignment shop and wore all summer long the year he was two. I could not wait for my daughter to get big enough to wear her older brother's hand-me-down dress, both because that's an amusing thing and because I find this particular dress adorable.

For a long time, I kept girl clothes around in the TT's dresser and closet, "just in case." "I want him to know he has options," I would say, although it was more and more clear that he'd already chosen. At one point, he asked me to stop suggesting those clothes to him when he was getting dressed, so I stopped including them among his choices for the day, but I left them where they were.

Gradually, I came to accept that he would probably never want to wear girls' clothes. I stopped accepting hand-me-down girl clothes from friends, and I sorted most of what we had into bags for Goodwill. Except a few of the cutest things. Except the daisy dress.

One day, the Tiny Tornado came to me carrying the daisy dress. "I don't want this to be in my drawer anymore," he told me.

"OK," I said, and I didn't let him see how disappointed I felt as I added it to the donations bag. "It's foolish to hold onto it," I told myself strernly. "Just because you loved that Word Boy wore it, just because you think the Tornado would look so cute in it. You're just the mom; you don't get to choose. Give it away."

I hope some boy or girl out there enjoyed the daisy dress. I loved that dress. I loved the little boy who wore it. And I love the little boy who refused to.

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