There’s a line, in Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, which I quote when I speak at gender conferences.
A woman has just given birth, and covered in sweat, exhausted, she asks the doctor, “Is it a boy or a girl?”
The doctor says, “It’s a little early to be imposing roles on it, don’t you think?”
There was a time when I didn’t find the joke very funny. Later on, as my son Oscar emerged as a darling little princess, the joke seemed much funnier. In the end, funny or not, I decided the line wasn’t a joke at all.
At the start, for all we knew we had a little boy. We weren’t inerested in making a little food soldier or boxer out of him, but we cut his hair like a boy, put him in overalls and baseball caps, and imagined for him a wide variety of lives which he would never lead. When it came time for daycare at eighteen months, something happened.
Parents of first born gender variant boys know what I’m talking about; it’s called the fantasy dress up corner, and it contains matching sets of butch and femme costumes. Policemen and firemen; ballerinas and princesses. Oscar was always a princess at dress up time.
Then Oscar was a princess….pretty much, all the time.
They tried urging him to check out the other costumes. He wasn’t interested.
My wife saw nothing strange about it—people freaking about about this kind of thing were misogynists, chauvinists, insecure weak minded men. Skirts are fun; sparkles are fun; colors are fun. Me, being a hypochondriac and pessimist, instantly figured our firstborn son was a transexual, and was doomed to a freakish loveless life, John Lithgow in The World According to Garp.
And my first impulse, powerful, out of nowhere, was not to see a therapist or consult the literature or figure out what was best for my kid; my first impulse was extinguish this behavior before it became a way of life, before he would be teased, before his life would be ruined. I didn’t want to wipe out these behaviors because they bothered me overmuch. Drop the family on a desert island and I wouldn’t have given a rats ass if the boy wanted to be a girl, a lizard or a beach ball.
I was worried about the world, of course.
Reading the stories in Baywindows about the seven transgendered prostitute murders the police hadn’t bothered to solve.
My wife knew it was nothing. In order to get through life, I had developed the habit of ignoring a lot of my feelings and impulses for periods of time, until it became apparent that, say, I didn’t have the leg cancer. Or nose cancer. Or Side cancer. So, I followed her lead. She’s rational. This was a phase. Just a phase!
I remember the daycare teacher, laughing uncomfortably with me about Oscar, as we pried the tutu off him to take him home one evening.
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s nothing,” she said. “My brother used to do this kind of thing when he was in preschool—and now he’s a navy seal!”
I smiled, and nodded, in no way reassured. Sometimes, you see, I’m right.
But really, we were both wrong; and both right. It wasn’t a phase, but there was nothing wrong with him. It wasn’t going away, but his life didn’t have to be ruined.
By the time my wife got worried, I was over it. We saw a therapist before Kindergarten, who told us, as so many well-meaning professionals will tell you, when you talk to them about gender development that, she didn’t really know anything about it, and that transexualism, is very very rare. Very rare!
But she said, from what she’d heard about Oscar, he seemed to be batting a transgender one thousand.
Should we send him to a public school, in our progressive east coast city?
“Sure,” she told us. “Give it a shot.”
Keep an eye on it, but don’t let it make you crazy. Nobody really knows. See what develops.
We were on our way.
