Someone is Wrong on the Internet

I was browsing my rss feeds this morning over breakfast, just passing the time, and happened upon Lisa Wade's post at Sociological Images, "Gender-Variant Children Continue to Confound", a discussion of the recent excellent New York Times piece, "What's so Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?" I enjoy Sociological Images, though I sometimes find their analyses a bit reductive. But today I was amazed that Wade could pack so much wrongness into such a short piece, starting with the title. I'm not sure who is "confounded" by gender-variant children. The Times article she linked to, for instance, is full of stories of parents who have come to accept and support their children, despite challenges. Psychologists and doctors who work extensively with gender-variant children have a pretty good understanding of what the various paths that such kids take look like; Raider and I had the chance to hear some such people speak at TransHealth this spring, and they didn't seem confounded at all. Neither did the parents in the parent support group we attended. Neither did the tweens and teens who came and went from the Teen Center, where I volunteered every day.

Sure, they had their questions, their anxieties, their concerns. But nobody was "confounded."

I think Wade is confounded because she is making a common mistake: she thinks it matters why these kids are the way they are. And the only answers she can come up with stem from her view of the way sexism plays out in our culture. This leads her to dismiss children's gender expression as inauthentic. Tomboys don't wear boys' clothes because wearing those clothes is an authentic gender expression, but as a way of "rejecting one’s maturing body" in order to "put off the sexual attention that comes with growing up." She says that male-bodied gender-variant children adopt a "sexualized...adult hyperfeminity," basing this on a photo of three kids dressed up for a fashion show at a camp for trans kids.

To my eye, those kids don't look either especially adult or sexualized. The "heels" she decries on two of the kids' feet are modest; the nail polish on one kid is a playful blue on one hand, pink on the other, and the ring the same child is wearing is a plastic flower. One child has a temporary tattoo; another is wearing one of the rubber bracelets that are all the rage these days. Their skirts are flirty layered skirts like I've seen on a gazillion cisgendered girls. They look like children dressed up, to me.

One of my friends on Facebook pointed out, too, that they are dressed for a fashion show. If I were dressed for a fashion show, I would be more made-up and more "feminized" than I am in my daily life. It's a bad sample Wade is drawing on here, and a wide generalization she's drawing from it.

She assumes, for instance, that this picture represents "their (or their camp counselors') idea of what it means to be a girl." I see two things wrong with that sentence (at least!). First, it reflects her assumption that children don't know their own minds, by bringing in the possiblity of them being dressed not as they prefer, but as an influential adult prefers. And second, she assumes that this picture is both an accurate and complete representation of what they think it "means to be a girl." My partner took a picture of me at a party last Saturday; I was wearing a dress cut so low I had to use double-sided tape to keep the neckline in place. Today I'm wearing a modest cotton sundress. Yesterday I had on pants. In my closet there is a beautiful princess dress for wearing to Renaissance Faires. Which of those outfits defines my idea of what it means to be a woman?

None of them, you say? You win the prize.

Wade should know better--she says, "even most biological girls don't dress/act this way most of the time." But she assumes that these kids do. It's sloppy thinking, driven, I think, by her own ignorance and prejudices.

She should meet more gender-variant kids. TransHealth is a free conference; she should come some time and watch and listen. She would see, yes, tween girls dressed in ways that could arguably be seen as sexualized and too-adult; a friend of mine who is a mother of cisgenderd girls that age calls it "the slut phase," and gender variant girls are not the only ones who go through it. But she might also meet the male-to-female tomboy I had pizza with one night, or the 10-year-old whose gender identity was explicity and firmly "boy" but whose gender expression was profoundly feminine. What was he saying about what it "means" to be a boy or girl? Nothing, I think. His self-expression spoke profoundly about what it meant to be him.

Wade says:

In contrast, girls, when they enact a tomboy role — and now I’m off into speculation-land — don’t seem to go so far into the weeds. We don’t see girls dressing up like lumberjacks or business men in suits and ties. They don’t do tomman, they do tomboy.

I take issue with so much in these three sentences. "Enact a tomboy role"--Wade loves language like this, that says these kids are performing gender rather than experiencing it, or expressing it authentically. These girls "don't seem to go so far into the weeds." So, we assume that the kids in the picture, waiting their turn at the fashion show, are off-track? They've made some kind of mistake? And so do tomboys! Sorry, "girls who enact a tomboy role." They're "in the weeds," too, just not so deeply. How should kids dress and act that wouldn't put them "in the weeds"? If a female-bodied child dresses "like a girl," is she out of the weeds? Or in the weeds in a different way? What can a child do that Wade would see as powerful, authentic, and worth taking seriously? How can any human being have an authentic gender expression in her view, especially if it is explicity "feminine" or "masculine"? Or are we all in the weeds, all the time?

And when she says, "We don't see girls dressing up like lumberjacks or business men in suits and ties," she really means, "I haven't seen this." Little persons whom Wade would call "girls" certainly do. Ok, not lumberjacks--that's a ridiculous example. What child these days has lumberjacks as a possible role model? But male athletes? Sure. Male police officers? Sure. Male superheroes? Sure. I wrote a hasty comment on the SocImages this morning, linking to this old blog post of mine. Scroll to the bottom, I said, to see a picture I flash around way too often: the Tiny Tornado in the vest and tie he insisted we buy him a couple of years ago.

I don't even know where TT found out about suits and ties at age 2 or 3. His dad goes to work every day in a t-shirt and jeans. But, somewhere, he found out about them. And by god, he wanted one. "We" do indeed see "girls" [sic] dressing up like business men, Dr. Wade.

A hint for folks whose theory has outpaced their experience: just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If the only thing you have to offer is a projection of your theory onto the lives of people you know little about, and self-admitted speculation, perhaps take a moment to consider broadening your experience. I am sure that, like most liberals, feminists, and intellectuals, you think of yourself as open-minded. Practice opening your mind to the lived experience of human beings living in their bodies--including children, who can be surprisingly self-aware, knowledgeable about their own experience, and forceful in their demands that they be respected for who they are.

 

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