My wife didn’t think interest in skirts was strange, so the dress-up moved into the house. She had an old floral skirt, a swishy, furled thing, which became Oscar’s.
He wore it to pieces.
I took my cues from her, hoping it was just a phase (even though I knew it wasn’t.) I’m not sure when I started peeking into the psychiatric stuff on the web. We discussed therapy, but were nervous about finding someone who would make whatever was happening worse. We both had a distrust of the profession. We knew that, not long ago, gays had been subjected to aversion therapy. These treatments turned out to be worse than worthless; they left scars.
My wife’s motto was do no harm. I couldn’t argue with her. I’d had problems with psychiatrists myself.
My feelings were so mixed. How to get him through childhood in one piece? As a borderline outsider myself (I was kind of an alpha-geek), I simply couldn’t imagine what a childhood would be like being so different, such an obvious target for bullying. Or maybe I could imagine it. I was waiting for the bullying to start; we would fight the bullying— but we’d lose. Of course we’d lose. You can’t control kids really; they’re cruel.
I wondered about how my sputtering career would withstand homeschooling.
Deep down I knew that maybe we could force Oscar to dress like a boy; cut his hair like a boy; tell him to act like a boy, but in the end, he’d be Oscar. He’d be himself. The toys he played with, the way he moved, the colors he loved, the tv-shows he watched, the characters he identified with, the burger king toys he demanded, the barrettes and lipstick stubs and hair ties he found in parks and on the sidewalk… We could police these lines, and it wouldn’t matter.
We could disguise him, but the bully’s would sniff him out in the end.
I imagined keeping him home to protect him. The problem—he was so social! He loved being with other kids! Instead of being bullied at preschool, he was oddly…popular? How long could that last, though? The teachers loved him, and they must have been working hard to keep things tolerant. When would that end?
There came a day when the floral skirt literally disintegrated. Oscar was sad about it, but my wife didn’t leap up and find another one for him either, I noticed. He had pretty things to wear; colors and patterns. We even thought of buying him a little Elvis-glam type suit. Maybe it wasn’t the girl-ishness at all; maybe it was a peacock like flamboyance. His hair was getting long. Boys can have long hair.
One day a neighbor knocked on the door. Our funky-cool childless neighbors with the stylish condo (no crayon on their walls) and the major body tatoos had brought Oscar a present.
Angela had made Oscar a boy-skirt. Green, with a fabric covered in boyish imagery; yellow bulldozers and red fire-engines. Her take of the compromise we were struggling with. Not really our take, at the moment, though.
I gritted my teeth. We thanked her. Oscar loved the new skirt—made just for him.
And he wore it everywhere.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
- beautiful how you and the neighbours did it. A boy is not necessarily a future man, instead he is he at this very moment. Remember childhood lasts very very long, much longer than those few years we adults would calculate it. They come from eternity, and eternity IS very long, eternal, in fact without time. At the beginning of their life they live in eternity (because the beginning, i.e. birth is not memorizable) until in course of ten or fifteen years time begins to structurize and become timegaps. Without those timegaps not much future thinking would be real for a young child.
Your Oscar may later be very thankful that you allowed him to be and remain himself, somebody who whishes to wear skirts etc.
And – this will be the foundation for a great maturity, for somebody who understands existence and lives according to his very innate character, un-spoiled, without much coining (or brain-cleaning) by some regulations or educations that are not his own.
May I whish Oscar a good life, childhood and thereafter, Stefan.
I love your blog, read almost every post. I also love your WordPress theme and I’m probably going to copy it. I think gender roles are far overreaching, so much that even people who are heterosexual and born with the right gender can be criticized for not being feminine enough or masculine enough. The good news is things are changing. I think being vocal about real-life experiences is great for helping this change move forward.
Thanks Noemi!
I use Wordpress Thesis, which is a not-free theme.
http://diythemes.com/thesis/
The gender non-conforming create rights which the next generation take for granted. Women working outside the home were once oddities. Men who did ‘women’s work’ were humiliated.
Things are changing. It’s just a matter of time.
I think it is wonderful that you have allowed your son to explore his other side. Most fathers would be screaming and yelling like some crazed banshee. Most guys fail to realize that a child recieves half of his genetics from his mother, therefore does have a “femenine side”. If more parents, instead of surrounding their sons with all masculine toys, would also buy them girls toys like dolls and teasets, just maybe there would be less male aggression against their female counterparts.
There’s no doubt that rigid stereotypical gender roles contribute to a male violence. Ironically, some of the most stereotypically male are transgender people overcompensating! So many late-transitioning transexuals have lived lives as body-builders, bikers, marines, cops, firemen. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things; it’s just sad when people feel compelled to hide behind the mask of gender, rather than being more truly who they feel they could be, should be, would like to be, inside.
I agree in part with “Bedford Hope”. The over compensation of male violence is caused by the forced suppression of the transgendered males feminine side. They do strike out on occasion. It is like a stram pipe, build up to much pressure and eventually somethings going to give way. Compelling masculine behavior in a transgendered child is going to explode eventually. Parents like Oscars are few and far between. Most will seek psychological help, blame themselves and some have gone as far as disowning their own children. If more parents were like Oscars maybe a lot of this homophobic thinking would subside or even disappear. A boy in a skirt or dress is just that, it doesn’t mean he is gay or a crossdresser, it just means he is being who he is at the time. At Oscars tender age, he doesn’t know if he going to be gay, he knows nothing of transvestism, all he knows is that it nice, its pretty, and he is comfortable with himself. Don’t try to over analyze the situation, let him be. As he grows up there are probably going to be other issues that will require greater understanding and strenght
heterosexual crossdresser is one of the possible outcomes which you come to terms with. When you think of the serious challenges faced by so many parents and children, life-threatening illness, learning disability, etc, the notion a person’s clothing preference could somehow be this epic tragedy is…astonishing. But we have been so…acculturated, so programmed, homophobia is so strong, that it permeates our feelings about crossdressing, even when the cross-dressers aren’t homosexual! Cross dressing is often portrayed as a purely sexual paraphilia, independent of gender identity, which I have come to think misses the point. But I’m an amateur at all this. I’ll know more as I go along.
Bedford Hope: “gender roles contribute to male violence”
I wonder how do you account for the lack of violence among the most rigid gender role societies? Are you aware that Japan has a very low rate of violence? Japanese society is one of the most rigid when it comes to gender roles. The mormons in Utah are extremely rigid in re gender roles. So by your reasoning they should be among the most violent. Actually it’s the opposite.
As for your absurdly unfair and ridiculous assertion that men who become marines, firefighters, bodybuilders, etc, are “overcompensating”, that just shows your own prejudices. do you also believe that women who become firefighters, marines, bodybuilders, are also “over compensating” for their own femininity?
If you’re opposed to violence, do you also criticize the “kick ass” movie/tv heroines that feminists are so fond of praising? Yeah, right.
Poorly worded, your right. I guess what I would say is that rigidly defined gender stereotypes in our culture is associated with some violent activity; homophobes and those who commit violence against GLTBQ people frequently use a ‘gay panic’ defense, which I think, suggests that rigidity here can be a problem, though we’re mixing gender identity and sexual preference. Bashers tend to mix these things up of course.
I don’t think I said all hyper-masculine people were compensating for repressed gender identity. You seem to want to be angry with me for some reason. In my mailing list experience, as I’ve listened to the life stories of dozens of families and thousands of individuals over the last ten years, quite a few people who transition later in life have been over compensators. So. There you go.
Violence in America is a complex phenomena. Conservatives like to blame our violence on a violent media culture, but as you say, Japan has a very violent (and pedophiliac) media culture in manga and anime and very little actual violence. Our melting pot, racial and ethnic tension, wealth disparity, history of slavery, gun culture, popular culture, so many things make our country different from the rest of the world. Our embrace of the new, the speed with which our culture changes, the shock that creates, is another thing that comes to mind.
As to whether rigid gender roles are good or bad for the culture at large, I ague they’re bad, as the realities that created them (strong divisions between women’s work and mens work based on upper body strength and access to eduction, for example) are simply no longer true. We know empirically that women and men are of equal intelligence for all practical purpose.
There’s nothing wrong with being hypermasculine; if one can do it without being a violent homophobe, of course. Your right to swing your fist ends at my, and my son’s, nose.
A woman who was violent and homophobic would piss me off, too.
The violence directed at GLBTQ people is real, and on the rise. This is the violence I have a problem with. Choosing to be yourself, in the face of this violence I think is brave. Attempting to protect those brave people is my mission. You have a problem with that?