Parenting, we all know, is about being consistent. Setting limits. Creating consequences. Maintaining authority—your kids don’t need you to be their friends. They need you to be their parents. Bad parenting, we are told, means going along, and getting along; shifting the goal posts. Giving up and giving in.
Imagine, then, parenting a gender-non-conforming child.
At first, they’re so young, so innocent, it’s hard to say no. It’s just a doll. Just a pink blanket. Everyone assures you too, that it doesn’t mean a thing. Everyone knows someone who was just like that, just like your kid, and now he’s fine, working the super-pro wrestling circuit as a seven-foot tall, 300 pound steroid giant. Or he’s a trucker, or a fireman, or some other manly member of the Village People. Normal! Super normal! Not a drag queen, anyway!
No, it doesn’t mean a thing.
Except, after a year, or two, or three you know it does. Now, you’re the parent—what are you going to to do about it?
The first impulse everyone—and I mean everyone—has is to gently suppress the tendency. Gently! You don’t want to make a big deal out of it—then you’re rewarding the behavior with attention! So, you will encourage the gender normative play, and ignore the gender non-conforming stuff. Behaviorism! Maybe you think this up on your own; maybe you find a therapist who thinks this is a good idea.
So, you give that a go.
It doesn’t work. Your kid gets worse. His behavior gets worse. Repressed kids have been known to grow suicidal at age seven or eight.
Can you imagine, wanting to kill yourself, at age 8? Can you imagine your kid wanting to? Now imagine your kid doing it; because some do. Can you imagine what that might do to your ideas of consequences, limits, and authority? You want to win this battle, and lose your child?
So you shop around for therapists, for treatments, and you find credentialed people who think that your kid can’t help what it is he likes, what he is attracted to. Maybe this makes sense to you instantly. Think about it; did you decide to like race cars? Football? Girls? Or did emerge from some deep core of identity full-formed?
Do you really think your ‘normalcy’ came from doing what you were told?
Or maybe this is a tough one, because maybe you can imagine that, yes, you did decide to like trucks and football and cars and girls because it was expected of you. Because you can’t really remember, can you?
How about now, though? Does your presentation, your sexual attraction, feel like something you do for someone else? Because it’s expected of you? No, it doesn’t. It’s part of you, isn’t it? It’s real. It’s not changing, either. It’s not going away.
So there’s your kid. He likes what he likes; he is what he is. And there’s not a thing wrong with it, other than the fact that a lot of people (who don’t really know your kid) think that there’s something wrong with it. Your kid is strong, smart, moral, happy, laughing, real, unstoppable, a force of nature.
Your kid makes you remember, though, every homophobic comment you’ve ever made; every joke at the expense of a poorly passing transexual; every unkind thought you’ve ever had to people like…your kid.
You will have to change yourself, change your kid, or withdraw, deny, to save your sanity.
I once heard an interview with a man who had been in the Christian Identity movement—a neo-nazi. He was a true believer, a good soldier, with the program, until he had a special needs kid. And in a conversation with a friend, he brushed up against the fact that in the world that the movement hoped to create, his son would be euthanized. He was weak. He would be destroyed.
Suddenly, this man wasn’t a Neo Nazi anymore.
Parents of gender non-conforming children go through this moment, too. Whatever you were, however accepting or progressive you may have thought of yourself, you find yourself struggling at the edge of this abyss. Fear of the other; shame at your own intolerance; fear of what the world might do to your child; fear that you will not be able to overcome your own programming.
The only rock you have left to stand on is unconditional love. Eventually you find yourself standing on it. But you aren’t the same person anymore. And, you realize, that is OK. Your kid is OK. You are OK.
There’s just the work to be done. You will have to figure out for yourself, what is right, and what is wrong, for your kid, for your family, for your community. You will make mistakes. You’ll look for guidance, for support, for friends, for community. If you’re lucky—if your kid is lucky—you’ll find them. No one can handle this alone.
You’ll be making it up as you go along, because that is the only way forward. You will know you are being a good parent. Even when others tell you you aren’t. Because you have lived it, and they have only briefly imagined it. You went through it.
You will do the best you can.
You must let your best be good enough.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Your child is lucky to have you
thanks. I look forward to a day when the sentiments in the blog are quaint, antiquated, and virtually incomprehensible. I think mostly some kids are unlucky about the communities they live in. I think most parents would be supportive if they weren’t afraid for their children’s safety.
You’re an astounding parent. Known fact.
You were better at making my kids behave than I was, which makes you even more astounding! So there! God they’re getting big now, tho.
Today Oscar and his friend Ellen were making a photobooth movie, singing, “I kissed a girl.” Oscar had drawn groucho eyebrows and a snidely whiplash mustache on this face, in a layered victor victoria kind of deconstruction of gender which threatened the fabric of the space-time continuum. Fortunately, the magic marker was removable.