Not Actually a Boy, and Here Are the Reasons Why

When I said the other day that I was going to try to do a post every day in August, I was hoping to pull my daily readership back into the low (very low) triple digits, which is where it lives when I'm posting regularly. And then my article at Friends Journal about the Tiny Tornado's gender history went viral. I don't know how many total hits it's gotten, but nearly over 14,000 people have "liked" it on Facebook, and it's been reblogged and linked to all over the place, including at It Bets Better, which must have given it a big boost.

The article has driven traffic to this blog as well. I got nearly 4000 hits on Friday, though today we're down to a mere 1500 (so far). I figure today's decline marks the end of my fifteen minutes, and I'm trying to accept it with good grace. By tomorrow I'll be a has-been, and by Tuesday, I hope to be poised for a comeback.

The response has been overwhelmingly good, but of course we've had the usual assortment of judgment and ignorance, and one or two actual trolls. A favorite activity for commentators is explaining why the Tiny Tornado could not possibly be a boy. We have heard all of these theories before, and we're going to hear them again. Here's what I think of them as of today.

1. Sexism

This is a common theory. It goes like this: The Tiny Tornado, observing the sexism that is rampant in our culture and recognizing the limited options available for women, decides to be a boy to protect himself and to give himself more opportunities.

Why I love it: A child who is two or three is not imagined to know enough about his internal landscape to express a preference about his own gender expression, but is nonetheless somehow able to analyze and interpret the cultural landscape in a sophisticated way and make a rational decision to maximize his privilege within it.

2. He is emulating his older brothers.

Another popular contender. In this one, the Tiny Tornado is so enamored of his older brothers that he abandons his innate and biological sex and gender in order to be more like them.

Why I love it: The Tiny Tornado, an independent, assertive, confident, fashion-conscious, extroverted athlete who doesn't sit still even when watching TV, is almost nothing like his older brothers. If he were emulating his older brothers, he'd consider extended periods of "alone time" to be essential to his functioning; he'd sit still for hours on end, building with Lego, reading, or playing Minecraft on-line with friends. If he wanted to be like Word Boy, he'd be more interested in dissecting animals than in training them, and if he wanted to be like the Lego Savant, he'd have a passion for history. His older brothers are wonderful kids and well worth emulating. But the Tiny Tornado is a force unto himself.

3. He's never seen a girl playing hockey or wearing an oxford shirt.

In other words, he simply lacks role models for the kind of tomboy he really is.

Why I love it: The theorist imagines that ze knows what the Tiny Tornado has and has not seen, and also that something as minor as a girl playing hockey (which he owns a book about) or wearing an oxford shirt (which he has seen many times on the older girls down the street who dress very well) could shape a person's entire identity. It would be like diverting the mighty Mississippi with a popsicle stick.

3. He doesn't know that being a lesbian is an option.

To be fair, this is actually part of the gender pathway for many gender-variant kids. It is not uncommon, I am told by people who know a lot more than I do about these things, for a kid to approach puberty, begin to feel sexual attractions, become aware of lesbians and gay men through the media, and realize that they can resolve their sense of not-fitting by coming out rather than by transitioning.

Why it doesn't work for the Tiny Tornado: many if not most of our closest friends are in same-sex relationships, including TT's much-loved Uncle Toots, who is practically a third parent to him. In addition, the two women next door, who are the best neighbors in the world and also TT's mentors in the world of dog training, are an affectionate couple who love each other very much and are not exactly conventional in the femininity department.

4. He wore a Spiderman t-shirt the summer he was two, and wanted short hair.

Nobody actually thinks that wearing a Spiderman t-shirt and cutting his hair makes TT a boy. But they think I think it.

Why I love this: Because these people simply don't know us. I identified as a lesbian for much of my adult life, and have a whole string of butch lovers in my past (and maybe not only in my past). If there is one thing I know about women, it's that they can have short hair and shop in the menswear department. In fact, I'd say that one of the things I love about women is that they can have short hair and shop in the menswear department.

Also: although I currently have luxuriant curly hair, this is me in the summer of 2009, holding my newborn nephew. Why did I have that haircut? Because I wanted to. Am I a girl? Yes.

Su Penn, who identifies as a girl, rocks her buzz cut.

5. His parents are unable to imagine anything beyond the gender binary.

I'm being playful in this post, so I won't rant about how people seem to believe that transgender kids somehow have an obligation to be "ungendered" or "bigendered" that their non-trans counterparts don't share. I will say that I do my best to imagine what is beyond the gender binary because people I love live there. And maybe the Tiny Tornado isn't fully aware of the option to be both/and or neither/nor or "other," but he has encountered the possibility. Our kids met a both/and adult who was helping in the children's program at TransHealth, and meeting zer challenged all three of them in ways that we are still having conversations about.

6. His parents are pushing him, deliberately or subconsciously, into a male identity for self-aggrandizement or to further their own political agenda.

Yeah, OK, this one is totally true.

Ha, no. Just kidding. If anything, our love of GLBTQ people (including our own selves) and our sense that we would find it somewhat satisfying if one or more of our kids grew up to be G, L, B, T, and/or Q led us to hold back, to not take steps like suggesting male pronouns or a name change until the Tiny Tornado brought them up or was offered them by other adults, because we didn't want to push him. We were always supportive, I think, but we really forced him to be very clear with us. If you want to know more about just how slow I really was to let go of the bright, sassy girl I was sure he was going to grow into, you might want to read the story of the daisy dress in this post from last August.

I sometimes still feel a little sad when I see a black girl of 6 or 7 or 8, with her hair done up nice in braids and beads, wearing something bold like a purple skirt with red tights, and bossing somebody around. I thought he was going to be that girl. I love boys. I love being the mother of boys. I was going to love my daughter, though, just as much. I wanted that girl, no denying it, and letting her go grieved me, even as I celebrated the emerging little boy.

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How Do You Know He Won't Change His Mind?

I have a tremendous backlog of writing notes--at the moment, I have notes in three different notebooks, which is simply unacceptable to me. I'm going to try to write a post every day during the month of August; I did it in May of 2012 and enjoyed it very much. I hope to be able to retire two notebooks. So here we go, in Notebook #1, all the way back to June, when I was at the TransHealth conference and had the opportunity to attend a talk by Dr. Johanna Olson, who works with transgender youth at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles.

Whenever I am involved in a conversation about young gender variant kids, somebody asks, "But how do you know he won't change his mind?" I've been asked this about the Tiny Tornado, and I've heard it asked at conferences and in on-line forums. The asker is generally concerned that such a young child is being allowed to make what seems like such a momentous decision. In addition, they imagine complications if a child chooses to live as their chosen gender for some number of years, and then remits.

I think these people would be interested to know that people who work extensively with trans and gender variant kids wonder about this, too: how can you tell, at age 6 or 7 or 8, which kids will revert and which kids will maintain their gender identity into adulthood? How do you choose an effective and appropriate treatment plan when you can't know a child's future gender with absolute certainty? Most kids, according to Dr. Jo, do grow through their gender variant behavior, and though many grow up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual, only a minority of gender variant kids are trans. How do you know which are which?

Well, according to Dr. Jo, trans kids tend to have a constellation of characteristics that gender variant kids will not share. They will tend to have most of the following characteristics:

• There is an early onset of gender variant behavior; age 2 or 3 is common (and in parent support groups, many of us had stories of kids asserting their gender preferences before age 2).
• The child experiences body dysphoria, which is to say, their body seems wrong to them. The Tiny Tornado, for instance, was never willing to call his genitals anything but a penis, and he still has anxiety about the possibility of someday growing breasts.
• The child has a consistent self-articulation around gender; their assertion of their chosen gender is, to quote Dr. Jo's PowerPoint slide, "tenaciously clung to, unremitting, pervasive, insistent, clear, and acute."
• The child engages in cross-gender play extensively or exclusively. A child identified as male will play only with dolls and his big sister's kitchen set; a child identified as female seeks out trucks and building toys.
• The child cross-dresses, either in daily life if allowed, or in pretend play.
• The child chooses playmates who share their preferred gender.
• The child either does or does not tend to engage in rough-and-tumble play.

I can hear you saying, "But some of those things fit me, and I'm not trans!" Me, too. I went through a stage in late elementary school when I preferred to wear my older brother's hand-me-downs over wearing my own girl clothes, and I was pleased if I was mistaken for a boy. This lasted a year or so. This list is explicitly making a distinction between a kid like me, who engages in gender variant behavior for some period of time, or in some circumstances, and a child whose gender identity is lasting and engages multiple areas of their life.

You may also be uncomfortable with the stereotypical elements of those last four items on the list. So is Dr. Jo. Nobody wants gender identity to depend on stereotypical behaviors. We all want kids to feel that they can engage in any kind of play, and with any playmates they choose, regardless of their gender. But anyone who has been a parent knows that it's not as easy as you think to create a generation of freewheelers, and, for now at least, it seems to be true that consistently crossing lines on gender stereotypical behavior is meaningful if it occurs in a context where other items on that list are also present.

Given the difficulty of predicting a child's future preference, Dr. Olson said that the tendency is to intervene cautiously, avoiding engaging in irreversible treatments prematurely. Social transition, which is what the Tiny Tornado has done by living full-time as a boy, is both the most effective treatment for young kids, and completely reversible. I had a friend once express her concern that we were making such an "irreversible" decision at such a young age--TT was not quite five. My response was that all we'd done was buy him boys' underwear and start calling him "he," and that these things could be reversed with a trip to Meijer and the letter "s."

Puberty suppression is also a completely reversible treatment. The use of hormone blockers delays puberty; it doesn't cause a child to enter puberty as the "other" sex. Discontinuing puberty blockers without engaging in cross-sex hormone replacement therapy simply allows the child to enter puberty as their biological sex later than they would otherwise have done.

Even the use of HRT is partially reversible, depending on how long a person has been using hormones and at what doses. Only sex-reassignment surgery (also called sex-confirmation surgery) is irreversible in all cases. So you can see that practitioners, children, and families have lots of time to develop an understanding and make good choices.

I have pages and pages of notes from Dr. Jo's presentation, but I think I've hit the highlights, and given myself something to point people to when they ask me this classic question. We can't know for sure he won't change his mind, but we can make a pretty good guess based on what we know about him, and about other trans kids.

I'm going to close with a semi-random collection of bits and pieces that didn't make it into the body of the post.

• By age 6 or 7, kids generally have internal gender constancy.
• Dr. Jo says, "You can't make a kid trans." This is also an answer to a question--or is it an accusation?--I've heard from time to time. So there.
• Gender Dysphoria is not, in and of itself, a psychiatric diagnosis. Well-adjusted trans kids do not necessarily need psychotherapy.
• It is hard to know how many kids are remitters--revert to their assigned gender--in part because, in most research, those who can't be followed up on are classified as remitters. Dr. Jo commented, for instance, that one Dutch clinic reports all clients they lose track of as remitters, because they assume that any trans youth who does not remit is still in treatment with them. For this and other reasons, she suspects that the reversion rate is overstated in the available research.
• Among adult trans people, about 1% express regret. Dr Jo says that this is often due to the difficulty of reconciling a new life when older, and she hopes that as this first cohort of effectively-treated trans youth grow up the rate will be lower.
• Social transition is a pretty strong predictor of persistence; kids who undergo social transition are about five times more likely to maintain their gender identity into adulthood.

 

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