I ranted a little on Facebook today, and then realized I might as well blog it as well.
I'm doing a lot of paperwork this morning, including getting the Tiny Tornado's petition for a legal name change filled out and printed. In Michigan, you can change your name for any non-fraudulent purpose, and when I changed mine, I was only asked whether I was doing it to evade debt or any other criminal sort of reason.
Unless it's for gender change reasons. In which case, you need a letter of support from an expert, cause god forbid *you* be the expert on your own name. It's so stupid! We could have named him Guyname Manlyman Lastname at birth and nobody would have stopped us, but now he's 7 and has CHOSEN HIS OWN NAME and we need a letter.
*grump, whine, complain*
Of course, we had no trouble getting a letter. The doctors at the Lurie Children's Sex & Gender Development Clinic have a form letter. "It is common that social transitioning for gender dysphoric children will lead to a dramatic improvement in social and psychological functioning, as Name_of_Child has experienced. There is no question that Name_of_Child was struggling with gender dysphoria and has benefitted from social transitioning."
But that it was easy for us to get the letter is not the point. The point is that people who don't fit the gender binary are unnecessarily subjected to additional scrutiny. AND THIS IS WRONG!
And the point is also that people who don't have the privilege of access to one of the THREE children's gender clinics in the whole country, or other knowledgeable and compassionate care providers, might find it difficult-to-impossible to get such a letter even though their child would also benefit from having a legal name that matches the name they use. THIS IS ALSO WRONG.
/end of rant
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gender. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Sunday, August 4, 2013
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.
Posted with BlogsySunday, August 26, 2012
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.
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.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
That Went Well
Our meeting at Gitche Gumee Elementary School went as well as could be hoped for on Friday. Both the teacher and the principal were immediately accepting of the Tiny Tornado's choice of name and gender, and both of them immediately understood that information about his gender status was for sharing only on a need-to-know basis. The principal ran through his list of who he thought those people were, and it primarily included folks like the classroom aid who will be taking the kids to the bathroom from TT's classroom. I might have questioned some of the list; I wasn't sure on first thought that every professional who deals with TT in any capacity needed to know. But, on reflection, it seems to me a good idea that they do. Just in case something extremely unlikely happens, like TT being "outed" by some kid who catches a glimpse of him with his pants down, the adult in the room needs to be ready to respond appropriately. So we were comfortable with the principal's list.
Miss Erica, the classroom teacher, had made a chart on the wall showing all the kids' birthday months. I was happy to see that she had used balloons as name tags for it, rather than flowers vs. firetrucks, and I couldn't see anything else in the room that was gender-specific in a stereotyped way. When I commented on this, she affirmed that she tries to run a gender-neutral classroom. She also said she'd make a new balloon for the TT to reflect his new name.
One of the two bathrooms nearest the classroom has been converted to an attached bathroom for a special-ed classroom, so TT's class will be using a single gender-neutral bathroom this year. Everyone in the room agreed that that had worked out very well, and TT was thrilled to hear about it when we got home and told him.
You could feel the pressure the principal is under as the school year approaches--he practically sprinted out of the room at the end of our meeting--but he stayed long enough to hear me thank them. "Some parents we know have not had such an easy time with their children's school," I said. Both Miss Erica and the principal were surprised by that. I have noticed this phenomenon for years; there are people who, without necessarily having any specific background in trans issues, nonetheless feel that it is no big deal at all. These folks can be genuinely shocked to hear that others do not think the same. This is not always a good thing--it can be hard to convince folks with that "what's the big deal?" mindset that there are social issues that need to be addressed, or they can sometimes see trans folks and their allies and loved ones as being a bit dramatic.
When it comes to my 5-year-old starting "Begindergarten," though, I have no problems with their cheerful naivete. Because they have so much control over how this plays out--they create the reality in that classroom and that school for the Tiny Tornado. And if that reality is a bubble where being transgendered is accepted as casually as being left-handed or brown-eyed, well, I am not sorry for TT to spend some more time there.
On another topic, I had a bit of a challenging day with the Tornado earlier this week. Of course I posted about it on Facebook, because I post about everything except sex and poop on there. Well, my poop. I'm pretty sure I've posted once or twice about someone else's, a dog or a kid.
Anyway, I was remembering that we used to have this wonderful but very difficult Moluccan cockatoo. His previous owner had named him Loki, and he lived up to that name. After a few years of struggle and love with this beautiful bird, we decided to change his name in the hope of shifting our own perception of him and giving him something else to live in to. So we started calling him Stevie, which fit his sweet and cuddly nature.
It occurred to me that TT's internet pseudonym might be like that. Call a kid a tornado, and he'll be a tornado. I thought that perhaps I should start calling him The Peaceful One instead. Because a mom can always hope.
Miss Erica, the classroom teacher, had made a chart on the wall showing all the kids' birthday months. I was happy to see that she had used balloons as name tags for it, rather than flowers vs. firetrucks, and I couldn't see anything else in the room that was gender-specific in a stereotyped way. When I commented on this, she affirmed that she tries to run a gender-neutral classroom. She also said she'd make a new balloon for the TT to reflect his new name.
One of the two bathrooms nearest the classroom has been converted to an attached bathroom for a special-ed classroom, so TT's class will be using a single gender-neutral bathroom this year. Everyone in the room agreed that that had worked out very well, and TT was thrilled to hear about it when we got home and told him.
You could feel the pressure the principal is under as the school year approaches--he practically sprinted out of the room at the end of our meeting--but he stayed long enough to hear me thank them. "Some parents we know have not had such an easy time with their children's school," I said. Both Miss Erica and the principal were surprised by that. I have noticed this phenomenon for years; there are people who, without necessarily having any specific background in trans issues, nonetheless feel that it is no big deal at all. These folks can be genuinely shocked to hear that others do not think the same. This is not always a good thing--it can be hard to convince folks with that "what's the big deal?" mindset that there are social issues that need to be addressed, or they can sometimes see trans folks and their allies and loved ones as being a bit dramatic.
When it comes to my 5-year-old starting "Begindergarten," though, I have no problems with their cheerful naivete. Because they have so much control over how this plays out--they create the reality in that classroom and that school for the Tiny Tornado. And if that reality is a bubble where being transgendered is accepted as casually as being left-handed or brown-eyed, well, I am not sorry for TT to spend some more time there.
On another topic, I had a bit of a challenging day with the Tornado earlier this week. Of course I posted about it on Facebook, because I post about everything except sex and poop on there. Well, my poop. I'm pretty sure I've posted once or twice about someone else's, a dog or a kid.
Anyway, I was remembering that we used to have this wonderful but very difficult Moluccan cockatoo. His previous owner had named him Loki, and he lived up to that name. After a few years of struggle and love with this beautiful bird, we decided to change his name in the hope of shifting our own perception of him and giving him something else to live in to. So we started calling him Stevie, which fit his sweet and cuddly nature.
It occurred to me that TT's internet pseudonym might be like that. Call a kid a tornado, and he'll be a tornado. I thought that perhaps I should start calling him The Peaceful One instead. Because a mom can always hope.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Boy is a Boy is a Boy
On Friday morning, Raider and I will be meeting with the Tiny Tornado's teacher and principal to talk about his gender status. I have just spent a little time working on my notes for that meeting, and it feels tricky. I know exactly what I want to say, and nothing is negotiable. We're not going in there to have a discussion about "how should we handle this?" We are going in there to make sure they know how we expect it to be handled. But I don't want to sound like an obnoxious lecturer, and I know it's hard for people to listen receptively when it seems like someone is hitting them with something unexpected, and laying down the law. So I am thinking about how to be gentle and at the same time communiciate that these things are firm, and not "suggestions" or "ideas" that we have.
This morning, the Tiny Tornado expressed concern that his name might make people think he is a girl. It's such an unusual name that this doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I share his concern. One of his nicknames is a shortened version of his name that does not sound girly at all, and I suggested that we start calling him that full-time. He loved the idea. I think his timing is good; it will be easiest if he starts school with this name.
My notes for the talk so far:
This morning, the Tiny Tornado expressed concern that his name might make people think he is a girl. It's such an unusual name that this doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I share his concern. One of his nicknames is a shortened version of his name that does not sound girly at all, and I suggested that we start calling him that full-time. He loved the idea. I think his timing is good; it will be easiest if he starts school with this name.
My notes for the talk so far:
The Tiny Tornado has exhibited a consistent interest in boy things, clothes, etc, since toddlerhood, and in May asked to be referred to by male pronouns. Since May, he has been living as a boy full-time. Therefore, he is starting Begindergarten as a boy. We are fully supportive of him in this choice, as is his doctor. It is in keeping with current best practices for gender-nonconforming children.
He is concerned that his full name will make people think he is a girl. He has asked to be called "Nickname," which does not have that problem. Nickname should be the name used full-time in class, on papers and anything written. He should be introduced to other children, parents, and staff as Nickname and with exclusively male pronouns. His full name and trans status must not be disclosed to any children or parents, or to staff who do not have access to his records. Staff who do have access to his records should be given this information so that they do not disclose inappropriately by accident.
He will use the boys' restroom.
It would be great if there wasn't a lot of "boy/girl" divisions in the classroom--nametags with flowers vs. firetrucks, lining up by boys and girls, boys vs. girls in a game, and so on. He needs to be supported in his chosen identity and activities like this draw attention to his gender status in a way that can make him uncomfortable.So far, my plan for making this all sound less like a lecture is to smile a lot, and say, "Do you have any questions? Do you have any experience with this kind of thing? Is there anything you'd like to know? Would you like some links to resources?" That may be the best I can do.
My Three Sons
Monday, August 13, 2012
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:
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.
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.
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.
Monday, July 16, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, June 11, 2012
It's Like a Game We're Playing
The Tiny Tornado is obviously still working through the end of preschool. The other day we had this conversation:
TT, whiny: Mom, do I have to go to preschool tomorrow?
Me: No, honey. You're all done with preschool.
TT, bursting into tears: You mean I'll never see Miss Kathleen again?
At home, despite my recent humorous take on the challenges, we're actually doing pretty well. He spends big chunks of his day playing video games, riding bikes, or sword-fighting with his big brothers. He does errands with me. He has taken up an old hobby, luring the dogs into his bedroom with treats and then dressing them up in t-shirts and shorts. He roots around in the recycling bin for supplies to make houses for his stuffed animals. He sets up obstacle courses in the living room. Overall, he does a pretty good job of keeping busy and actually out of trouble.
My biggest challenge with him is one I still have with Word Boy: the endless chatter, the endless questions. I'm thinking about setting a limit on how many times per day each kid can say, "Mom...?" We'll see how that goes.
The other challenge is this whole boy thing. He stands firm in his gender identify for the moment. "I'm still a boy," were his first words to Raider when he woke up the other morning, and he asked me, "Am I still a boy if I go in there?" when I made as if to take him into the women's room with me. (I assured him that many boys go into the women's room with their moms until they are 5 or even 6.)
For the most part, I am carrying this lightly, as he seems to be. That's made easier because it doesn't quite feel real to me. It feels like a game we're playing. Maybe that's partly because, except for the pronouns, nothing has changed. The Tiny Tornado didn't need new underwear, a new haircut, new clothes, or new toys to be a boy. Just a new pronoun.
It also doesn't feel real because, really, what are the odds? Our lives are full of female-to-male transgendered people. Sure, some of them we've met because, at some point, we started hanging out in that community. But a number of people in our lives have transitioned since we met them--including three people who were still living as women when I dated them, and one close friend of Raider's. Most of these folks are still important parts of our lives.
And then we go adopt some random baby, and he turns out to be gender-nonconforming? *rolls eyes* You wouldn't believe it if I put it in my novel.
The other day, Raider and I got to go out to lunch together while all three kids were at a movie with a friend. We talked about this, of course. I said, "I can't help wondering if in some subtle way we made this happen."
Raider laughed. "You've met the Tiny Tornado, of course?"
I'm not a big fan of "things were meant to be." I love being the Tiny Tornado's mom and can't imagine life without him--but I assume I'd feel the same way about the baby girl whose mom decided to parent her a few months before we brought TT home, or whatever baby we might have adopted had the Tiny Tornado's placement with us fallen through.
But I have often thought that the TT is lucky to have us. He's a challenging kid (though, really, what kids aren't? Maybe your kids. Not mine. Not most of the kids I know, even the "easiest" ones). And we've done a good job of rolling with those challenges. We've always been good at appreciating our kids' qualities even when those very qualities were what made the days hard sometimes--and that's certainly true of the Tiny Tornado, whose drive and self-assurance and competence are a wonder to behold, even as you're excusing yourself to scream into a pillow, "Why the hell can't he ever just do what I ask him to do one time, just one time, without arguing! Argh!"
"Isn't he a wonder?" we say to each other. "Now can you watch him for awhile so I can take a xanax and a nap?"
People often say to me, "I admire the Tiny Tornado so much. But I'm glad you're his mom and not me." I always find "better you than me" statements a little judgmental, but at the same time, I am also glad I'm his mom and not someone else. Because I'm doing a good job with him. And I can imagine that many people might not.
My point was going to be, though, that on top of all that, he's genderqueer. In all the randomness of adoption--the agency we chose; K's decision to place her baby for adoption; her decision to let the agency choose the baby's placement just when we were the family who'd been waiting the longest, rather than choosing herself from all the waiting families--in all of that, this little female-bodied boy ended up with us.
Without false modesty, I am going to suggest that we are probably one of the ten American families who are best prepared to deal with a gender-nonconforming child. And here he is, right now, putting sunglasses on the dogs.
What are the odds?
Like I said, I don't cotton to "it was meant to be." I don't know a thing about what is "meant" and what is just the serendipitous one-in-ten-million chance.
To be honest, I'm not entirely happy about it. About the boy thing, I mean. I've pretty well gotten over my disappointment at not being able to buy funky, colorful girl clothes, and my disappointment at not being able to use all that work and study I put into learning to care for and braid nappy hair. But the boy thing, I'm still working on that.
I used to roll my eyes when I heard gay men and lesbians say, "I wouldn't want my kids to be gay." Because being gay was the best! I loved being a lesbian! I loved lesbians! I loved being part of that community. I loved gay men, the quiet steady ones and the flamboyant ones who showed up at Pride dressed like Vegas showgirls. I could hardly imagine a better outcome for my hypothetical children than being gay.
My thesis advisor at Goddard, Nora Mitchell, whote a poem called "Faggots" that always spoke to me. Here it is:
FAGGOTS
My lover says sometimes
that I look like a faggot, meaning
like a man
who looks like a woman.
On the dark streets a woman veers away from me
and walks faster. Hands jammed
in my pockets and fast-moving,
I am also trying to stay safe
in my city at night. Like a child
I want to protest, I'm a girl --
over and over -- to this woman,
to my father's two friends in the hardware store.
They said they'd have to see me throw
before they'd believe me, but I knew
that I threw just like a boy.
Coming up behind me, my lover teases,
you swish, as if I had to
pretend to walk like a woman,
or it were something I could mimic, like a man.
Like her I love the way faggots move;
I love the humor in their eyes,
their wrists, their chins,
as if their bodies kept faith
with the fire of laughter and repeated
some old joke the world could never get.
Queens are men
who leave their names behind
with all their reasons as delicate
as the works in the heart
of a watch. Robert
becomes Robin, or someone more
extravagent, more vulnerable still.
I love transmen and female-to-male transgender people. I think it's clear I have a way of finding them, sometimes even before they've found themselves.
But when I let myself think ahead, when I forget that we're not worrying about what happens in five or ten years or wondering if our insurance will cover hormone blockers, or whether there's a decent developmental endocrinologist in Michigan with at least some experience with gender-nonconforming children--well, I hope he's not a boy.
Because if he is, well, that comes with a whole lot of challenges. Everyone I know who has transitioned is happy with that choice. But there is often a residue of questions, of regret: from going through puberty as the wrong sex, from never having a perfectly ordinary male body. At TransHealth, I went to a workshop in which a doctor and a psychologist talked about current best practices for trans kids, which usually includes a gender-appropriate puberty. One of them referred to the damage done by past bad practices. After the workshop, a friend cried on my shoulder for a bit. He didn't say why. But I think it was regret for what might have been possible for him had he been a child today.
Gender-appropriate puberty carries a cost, though: almost always, the loss of fertility; not being allowed to participate in either girls' or boys' sports; wondering if your friends would still love you if they knew.
Then, too, harboring, under your clothes, body parts that don't match people's perceptions of your gender is dangerous. Trans people are at high risk of violence. Already, even before the Tiny Tornado chose male pronouns, I worried about what might happen if someone assumed "she" was a boy and then learned differently. Not that I expected physical violence, but expressions of discomfort, of disgust, of judgment? That, I worried about.
I want the Tiny Tornado to be who he is. Of course I do. With all my heart. And if he grows up to join that large and loving community of trans people I love so much, well, I know he will be welcomed and loved there, as indeed he already is and always has been.
I think I just want, like all parents, for my kids' lives to be easy. The Tiny Tornado is perfectly happy, deeply engaged with everything and everyone he loves, in love with his own luscious self, full of piss and vinegar. He has no idea he's on a hard road.
But I do.
TT, whiny: Mom, do I have to go to preschool tomorrow?
Me: No, honey. You're all done with preschool.
TT, bursting into tears: You mean I'll never see Miss Kathleen again?
At home, despite my recent humorous take on the challenges, we're actually doing pretty well. He spends big chunks of his day playing video games, riding bikes, or sword-fighting with his big brothers. He does errands with me. He has taken up an old hobby, luring the dogs into his bedroom with treats and then dressing them up in t-shirts and shorts. He roots around in the recycling bin for supplies to make houses for his stuffed animals. He sets up obstacle courses in the living room. Overall, he does a pretty good job of keeping busy and actually out of trouble.
My biggest challenge with him is one I still have with Word Boy: the endless chatter, the endless questions. I'm thinking about setting a limit on how many times per day each kid can say, "Mom...?" We'll see how that goes.
The other challenge is this whole boy thing. He stands firm in his gender identify for the moment. "I'm still a boy," were his first words to Raider when he woke up the other morning, and he asked me, "Am I still a boy if I go in there?" when I made as if to take him into the women's room with me. (I assured him that many boys go into the women's room with their moms until they are 5 or even 6.)
For the most part, I am carrying this lightly, as he seems to be. That's made easier because it doesn't quite feel real to me. It feels like a game we're playing. Maybe that's partly because, except for the pronouns, nothing has changed. The Tiny Tornado didn't need new underwear, a new haircut, new clothes, or new toys to be a boy. Just a new pronoun.
It also doesn't feel real because, really, what are the odds? Our lives are full of female-to-male transgendered people. Sure, some of them we've met because, at some point, we started hanging out in that community. But a number of people in our lives have transitioned since we met them--including three people who were still living as women when I dated them, and one close friend of Raider's. Most of these folks are still important parts of our lives.
And then we go adopt some random baby, and he turns out to be gender-nonconforming? *rolls eyes* You wouldn't believe it if I put it in my novel.
The other day, Raider and I got to go out to lunch together while all three kids were at a movie with a friend. We talked about this, of course. I said, "I can't help wondering if in some subtle way we made this happen."
Raider laughed. "You've met the Tiny Tornado, of course?"
I'm not a big fan of "things were meant to be." I love being the Tiny Tornado's mom and can't imagine life without him--but I assume I'd feel the same way about the baby girl whose mom decided to parent her a few months before we brought TT home, or whatever baby we might have adopted had the Tiny Tornado's placement with us fallen through.
But I have often thought that the TT is lucky to have us. He's a challenging kid (though, really, what kids aren't? Maybe your kids. Not mine. Not most of the kids I know, even the "easiest" ones). And we've done a good job of rolling with those challenges. We've always been good at appreciating our kids' qualities even when those very qualities were what made the days hard sometimes--and that's certainly true of the Tiny Tornado, whose drive and self-assurance and competence are a wonder to behold, even as you're excusing yourself to scream into a pillow, "Why the hell can't he ever just do what I ask him to do one time, just one time, without arguing! Argh!"
"Isn't he a wonder?" we say to each other. "Now can you watch him for awhile so I can take a xanax and a nap?"
People often say to me, "I admire the Tiny Tornado so much. But I'm glad you're his mom and not me." I always find "better you than me" statements a little judgmental, but at the same time, I am also glad I'm his mom and not someone else. Because I'm doing a good job with him. And I can imagine that many people might not.
My point was going to be, though, that on top of all that, he's genderqueer. In all the randomness of adoption--the agency we chose; K's decision to place her baby for adoption; her decision to let the agency choose the baby's placement just when we were the family who'd been waiting the longest, rather than choosing herself from all the waiting families--in all of that, this little female-bodied boy ended up with us.
Without false modesty, I am going to suggest that we are probably one of the ten American families who are best prepared to deal with a gender-nonconforming child. And here he is, right now, putting sunglasses on the dogs.
What are the odds?
Like I said, I don't cotton to "it was meant to be." I don't know a thing about what is "meant" and what is just the serendipitous one-in-ten-million chance.
To be honest, I'm not entirely happy about it. About the boy thing, I mean. I've pretty well gotten over my disappointment at not being able to buy funky, colorful girl clothes, and my disappointment at not being able to use all that work and study I put into learning to care for and braid nappy hair. But the boy thing, I'm still working on that.
I used to roll my eyes when I heard gay men and lesbians say, "I wouldn't want my kids to be gay." Because being gay was the best! I loved being a lesbian! I loved lesbians! I loved being part of that community. I loved gay men, the quiet steady ones and the flamboyant ones who showed up at Pride dressed like Vegas showgirls. I could hardly imagine a better outcome for my hypothetical children than being gay.
My thesis advisor at Goddard, Nora Mitchell, whote a poem called "Faggots" that always spoke to me. Here it is:
FAGGOTS
My lover says sometimes
that I look like a faggot, meaning
like a man
who looks like a woman.
On the dark streets a woman veers away from me
and walks faster. Hands jammed
in my pockets and fast-moving,
I am also trying to stay safe
in my city at night. Like a child
I want to protest, I'm a girl --
over and over -- to this woman,
to my father's two friends in the hardware store.
They said they'd have to see me throw
before they'd believe me, but I knew
that I threw just like a boy.
Coming up behind me, my lover teases,
you swish, as if I had to
pretend to walk like a woman,
or it were something I could mimic, like a man.
Like her I love the way faggots move;
I love the humor in their eyes,
their wrists, their chins,
as if their bodies kept faith
with the fire of laughter and repeated
some old joke the world could never get.
Queens are men
who leave their names behind
with all their reasons as delicate
as the works in the heart
of a watch. Robert
becomes Robin, or someone more
extravagent, more vulnerable still.
I love transmen and female-to-male transgender people. I think it's clear I have a way of finding them, sometimes even before they've found themselves.
But when I let myself think ahead, when I forget that we're not worrying about what happens in five or ten years or wondering if our insurance will cover hormone blockers, or whether there's a decent developmental endocrinologist in Michigan with at least some experience with gender-nonconforming children--well, I hope he's not a boy.
Because if he is, well, that comes with a whole lot of challenges. Everyone I know who has transitioned is happy with that choice. But there is often a residue of questions, of regret: from going through puberty as the wrong sex, from never having a perfectly ordinary male body. At TransHealth, I went to a workshop in which a doctor and a psychologist talked about current best practices for trans kids, which usually includes a gender-appropriate puberty. One of them referred to the damage done by past bad practices. After the workshop, a friend cried on my shoulder for a bit. He didn't say why. But I think it was regret for what might have been possible for him had he been a child today.
Gender-appropriate puberty carries a cost, though: almost always, the loss of fertility; not being allowed to participate in either girls' or boys' sports; wondering if your friends would still love you if they knew.
Then, too, harboring, under your clothes, body parts that don't match people's perceptions of your gender is dangerous. Trans people are at high risk of violence. Already, even before the Tiny Tornado chose male pronouns, I worried about what might happen if someone assumed "she" was a boy and then learned differently. Not that I expected physical violence, but expressions of discomfort, of disgust, of judgment? That, I worried about.
I want the Tiny Tornado to be who he is. Of course I do. With all my heart. And if he grows up to join that large and loving community of trans people I love so much, well, I know he will be welcomed and loved there, as indeed he already is and always has been.
I think I just want, like all parents, for my kids' lives to be easy. The Tiny Tornado is perfectly happy, deeply engaged with everything and everyone he loves, in love with his own luscious self, full of piss and vinegar. He has no idea he's on a hard road.
But I do.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Pretty, Pretty Princess
Ever since I wrote yesterday about the Tiny Tornado and her love of all things culturally coded "boy," I'm been thinking about the girls who love the things coded "girl." I like these girls, too, and I want to be careful that, when we're cheering the Tiny Tornado on as she engages the world in what is obviously a very self-directed and awesome way, we're not inadvertently dismissing kids whose awesomeness doesn't cut across the grain. Those of us who are nonconforming in some significant way love to see nonconforming kids letting their freak flag fly, especially if we weren't able to fly ours.
But sometimes we carelessly talk as if kids who clearly identify as "boy" or "girl," or whose dress is comfortably within the limits of what is culturally approved, are not also exercising their preferences. As if the only reason a girl could love princesses is because she's a weak-headed dupe of the patriarchy.
It's important to remember that the limits of what is culturally approved actually encompass a lot of variation. Sometimes it's relatively sublte. Word Boy and the Lego Savant are both pretty much "typical" boys, and they both dress in a fairly standard boy-style costume of t-shirts and cargo pants or sweats. But the Lego Savant has a strong preference for solid, dark colors--he wears a lot of black t-shirts. If they have any design on them, it's probably a skull. Word Boy likes stripes. He has a lot of navy blue t-shirts with red or light blue or gray or maroon stripes. Neither of them is very athletic, but their friend A--also a "typical" boy--is. He is athletically talented and self-confident to the point of boldness. I can remember watching a bunch of kids run across a field when A and the Lego Savant were preschoolers, and just watching them run randomly around, you could see A's talent in his grace, his form, his speed. He just didn't run the same way the other little kids ran.
My point is that even a homogenous-seeming group of "typical boys" will have a lot of variation.
And when you get to the girls--whoa nelly! There are a number of girls in the Tiny Tornado's preschool class, who dress in conventional girl ways. But they don't really dress alike. There is one girl who likes nice dresses; she often shows up in a green velvety number with a satin sash. There are a couple of girls who have that "young fashion designer" vibe going--they're putting together funky and unexpected combinations of striped tights, bright colored skirts, shirts in colors that clash just a little bit. One of the girls likes to have interesting things on her head: sparkly head bands, heart-shaped doodle boppers. And there are several girls who always or nearly always, so far as I can tell, wear pants.
My best friends have a 5-year-old girl who will only ever wear dresses, and usually dressy ones rather than casual. One of her moms told me one time, "I just walk into the store and ask if they have anything glamorous in a size 5." She is the girliest girl that ever girled a girl (and, as an aside, though in general we find it appalling when people sexualize kids by talking about their "boyfriends" and "girlfriends," my friend and I cannot resist, when the Tiny Tornado and the Glamour Girl are playing together, characterizing them as the world's tiniest and most adorable butch-femme couple. Goddess forgive us).
My point is: these girls are not dupes. They are not weak. Unless their clothing choices are being coerced by their parents, which I know happens but I hope is rare, they are exercising their preferences just as much as the Tiny Torndao is. The Tiny Tornado isn't the only little kid with agency just because her agency is so visible in her unconventional choices. She didn't corner the market on preschool awesome. There's plenty of it to go around, and that long-haired girl with the Hello Kitty t-shirt and the twirly skirt and the shiny shoes by God got her share of it, and is putting it to work.
But sometimes we carelessly talk as if kids who clearly identify as "boy" or "girl," or whose dress is comfortably within the limits of what is culturally approved, are not also exercising their preferences. As if the only reason a girl could love princesses is because she's a weak-headed dupe of the patriarchy.
It's important to remember that the limits of what is culturally approved actually encompass a lot of variation. Sometimes it's relatively sublte. Word Boy and the Lego Savant are both pretty much "typical" boys, and they both dress in a fairly standard boy-style costume of t-shirts and cargo pants or sweats. But the Lego Savant has a strong preference for solid, dark colors--he wears a lot of black t-shirts. If they have any design on them, it's probably a skull. Word Boy likes stripes. He has a lot of navy blue t-shirts with red or light blue or gray or maroon stripes. Neither of them is very athletic, but their friend A--also a "typical" boy--is. He is athletically talented and self-confident to the point of boldness. I can remember watching a bunch of kids run across a field when A and the Lego Savant were preschoolers, and just watching them run randomly around, you could see A's talent in his grace, his form, his speed. He just didn't run the same way the other little kids ran.
My point is that even a homogenous-seeming group of "typical boys" will have a lot of variation.
And when you get to the girls--whoa nelly! There are a number of girls in the Tiny Tornado's preschool class, who dress in conventional girl ways. But they don't really dress alike. There is one girl who likes nice dresses; she often shows up in a green velvety number with a satin sash. There are a couple of girls who have that "young fashion designer" vibe going--they're putting together funky and unexpected combinations of striped tights, bright colored skirts, shirts in colors that clash just a little bit. One of the girls likes to have interesting things on her head: sparkly head bands, heart-shaped doodle boppers. And there are several girls who always or nearly always, so far as I can tell, wear pants.
My best friends have a 5-year-old girl who will only ever wear dresses, and usually dressy ones rather than casual. One of her moms told me one time, "I just walk into the store and ask if they have anything glamorous in a size 5." She is the girliest girl that ever girled a girl (and, as an aside, though in general we find it appalling when people sexualize kids by talking about their "boyfriends" and "girlfriends," my friend and I cannot resist, when the Tiny Tornado and the Glamour Girl are playing together, characterizing them as the world's tiniest and most adorable butch-femme couple. Goddess forgive us).
My point is: these girls are not dupes. They are not weak. Unless their clothing choices are being coerced by their parents, which I know happens but I hope is rare, they are exercising their preferences just as much as the Tiny Torndao is. The Tiny Tornado isn't the only little kid with agency just because her agency is so visible in her unconventional choices. She didn't corner the market on preschool awesome. There's plenty of it to go around, and that long-haired girl with the Hello Kitty t-shirt and the twirly skirt and the shiny shoes by God got her share of it, and is putting it to work.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Anarchy in the Pre-K
On Wednesday, Yehva's second day of preschool, she felt nervous about going and asked me to go in with her. She was already perking up by the time we climbed the stairs to the third floor, where her classroom is, and had started telling me about all the things she was going to do, and what she wanted to show me, and once we were in the room, she did all her stuff--hanging up her backpack, washing her hands--independently, while I stood around watching.
Edited to add: Carl, David and I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World the other night. I agree with reviewers who think it dragged a little around the third through fifth evil exes, but we were also clearly the target audience and so there was much for us to enjoy in it (we all squee'd with delight when we recognized the Zelda theme music on the soundtrack, for instance). Also, this whole not-so-much-with-the-girl-stuff thing Yehva has going on is one of the things that makes me glad she found her way to us, where we're pretty much down with whatever combination of gender(s) and sexualities the kids work out for themselves.
During circle time, the kids sang a song and one of the two teachers told them about what was at the art table, the sand table, and so on for the day. Then one of the four-year-olds (the four-year-olds are so big and mature! It's amazing) said, "Ms. S, I don't know how many children are here today," and the teacher said, "Well, why don't you count them?"
So the little girl did. She even remembered to count herself, which impressed me.
Then somebody wondered out loud how many girls there were in the class. And the teacher told this same little girl to count them. She counted a little girl with long curly blonde hair, and herself. "That's right, there are two girls!" the teacher said.
The other teacher said, "We have three girls in the class, Ms. S." And Ms. S said, "But L. isn't here today! We have two girls today."
One of the boys wanted to count the boys, and he did. He counted Yehva as one of the boys, and announced that there were 8 boys in the class. "That's right!" Ms. S said perkily.
The other teacher said, "There are seven boys in the class today." I think she might have been trying to avoid saying "Yehva is a girl" out loud--maybe so Yehva wouldn't feel self-conscious?--but I was about a half-second from saying it myself. When Ms. S still didn't seem to get it, the second teacher moved over behind Yehva, and pointing down at her from behind her back, said firmly, "Ms. S, there are three girls in the class today." At which point you could see the "No Clue/ Gets It" meter flip in Ms. S's head, a la Scott Pilgrim.
Ms. S was mortified, and she apologized to me later. The whole thing went over Yehva's head; through this whole drama, she sat happily on her little mat waiting for free-play time so she could turn the music player on and dance.
My own reaction was surprisingly complex. On the one hand, I don't really blame the teacher for "reading" Yehva as a boy during circle time; little kids and their hair and clothes are so strongly gender-coded that it's no wonder someone who had just met the kids two days earlier, and who was preoccupied with managing 10 of them, would slip into temporarily thinking that a little kid in boys' shoes, blue jeans, a boys' t-shirt, and a mohawk was a boy. Heck, I have trouble looking at her and seeing a girl sometimes. (David, after cutting the mohawk: "We'll never convince anybody she's a girl now." Me: "Are we convinced she's a girl?")
At the same time, I felt surprisingly emotional about it. By the time Ms. S's clue-meter clicked over, I had tears starting behind my eyes. I still don't really know why; I wasn't angry, Yehva was just sitting happily and obliviously in the circle. But there you have it.
I'm not reading a lot into Yehva's current fashion sense. She does vehemently reject flowered shirts, and she did ask David to cut the decorative sateen bow off her underpants tonight. She is awfully fond of Spider-man, she did ask me to take her to another minor-league baseball game, and she did strongly express her desire for, first, short hair and then, a mohawk like Eric's. But I'm not really sure what, if anything, that means for a kid who is barely 3. As the poet says, I witness and wait.
Edited to add: Carl, David and I saw Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World the other night. I agree with reviewers who think it dragged a little around the third through fifth evil exes, but we were also clearly the target audience and so there was much for us to enjoy in it (we all squee'd with delight when we recognized the Zelda theme music on the soundtrack, for instance). Also, this whole not-so-much-with-the-girl-stuff thing Yehva has going on is one of the things that makes me glad she found her way to us, where we're pretty much down with whatever combination of gender(s) and sexualities the kids work out for themselves.