It’s OK to be a gay middle-schooler—as long as you’re gender normative!

The New York Times article Coming Out in Middle School shines a guttering ray of sunshine into the families of some GLTBQ youth. As a parent of a gender non-conforming, presexual middle-schooler, of course, I run smack-dab into this apositive phrase, and stare forlornly into the steaming dump the author has taken in my cornflakes.

In particular, openly gay youth who are perceived as conforming to adolescent gender norms are often fully integrated into their peer and school social circles. Girls who come out as bisexual but are still considered “feminine” are often immune from harassment, as are some gay boys, like Laddie, who come out but are still considered “masculine.” “Bisexual girls have it the easiest,” Austin told me in Oklahoma. “Most of the straight guys at school think that’s hot, so that can make the girl even more popular.”

Ah. Well. As long as you slip past the gender police, you’re fine. Look; if you want to just feel good that some kids are feeling good, stop reading now. I gotta say this, though, because my kid has once again been edited from the picture. I talked about this in Trans kids, the Media, and the Excluded Middle, and the next day, boom, I find this damn thing. Obviously, the sentence implies that the non-gender normative aren’t doing well…or are they?

It is hard for us to tell what it’s really like, for most kids like mine, out in the great red middle. We are connected through the intertubes with other families from everywhere, and some kids seem to be doing pretty well; of course, these kids don’t express much outside the home. That’s a privilege reserved for the coasts. The places Falwell and Robertson accused of exciting God’s wrath on 9/11.

But as a parent who grew up in the 70s, the landscape feels so hopeful; gay-straight alliances? Really? They exist? How cool! But…is my kid really Gay? Maybe not. Maybe he’s trans. Or she’s trans. Or Ze’s gender-queer. Um. Are we included? Not necessarily, as it turns out.

As a straight, het, white-guy, I was one of those few dozen people  in my demographic incensed when Barney Frank and the pramatists threw transgender people to the back of the bus (or under it’s wheels) by explicitly dropping gender identity from the bill protecting some gays and lesbians (the gender normed ones) from employer discrimination.

Or as John Aravosis at  Salon asks, “How Did the T get into GLBT?”

So for us, every step ahead for the gay and lesbians who sneak past the gender police, is bittersweet. When it comes down to it, some folks don’t even want us in the acronym. Gender freedom is different from sexual preference, because people have sex in private. Gender is expressed in public. People can learn to stop worrying about what people do behind closed doors.

One great way to get that anxiety off your chest, alas, is to beat up the guy in the dress.

So John Aravosis asks, why should he feel close to people like my son. Because…for every Matthew Sheppard, there are 10,000 transgender martyrs no one mourns, no one celebrates? Aravosis says, Conservatives understand that cultural change is a long, gradual process of small but cumulatively deadly victories. Maybe it makes sense. I suppose Jim Crow was a step up from actual slavery.

As a white male het man, prone to the anger, I can’t help but want to  punch Avrosis in the face, knock out a few of his teeth, and tell him how in a previous era I would have beaten him to death. Then ask him how he feels about gradual progress. Just a momentary impulse. It passes. Not an appropriate one. Unless you realize, it’s my kid we’re talking about here.

We live in an era lacking solidarity; in an era in which the very word is seen as a kind of hippie commie joke. That some in the community fail to see that we are fellow travelers, that we rise or fall together, is I suppose inevitable. Some gender norm gays and lesbians choose to ignore the fact that persecution for gender expression is the mechanism by which most gays are suppressed. The sociopathic lack of empathy which came into vogue with Reagan infects many, gay, straight, and everything in between.

I don’t have to like it.

So I celebrate these gay middle schoolers. After all, my son could take off his skirt at any second, ask me to burn all the photos of him as a kid, re-enter the newly broadened mainstream, and t hen I could embrace gradualism too! Let someone else worry about the femme, the butch…

Maybe. But not today.