Before I Got It

There was only one moment when the appearance of my son in his boy-skirt induced a surge of humilation. The family was out in public, Oscar in the Boy Skirt, and I was uncomfortably going with the flow. I didn’t have a lot of friends in the immediate neighborhood, my son was three years old, who was even going to know?

“Hey, Bedford!”

It was my african-american friend, Mathias.

“Hi,” I said. Fuming. Mathias looked a little confused, but then, he often did; we chatted. I said nothing about Oscar or the boy skirt. I felt stupid. Bad. Angry. Angry at…?

When we got home, I yelled at my wife. “Why are we going out in public with him dressed like that?”

I’d been having an argument with Mathias for the better part of a year about sexual preference. He was admittedly homophobic—and at the same time, ultra-sensitive to racism directed at african americans. I kept pointing out the paradox. And he kept refuting it.

“It’s totally different,” he would say. “I can’t change the color of my skin.” I’d say the same about sexual orientation. And we’d go round and round and round. The weird thing was, both of us never gave up trying to convince the other.

At one point, he made a derisive comment about a butch lesbian we both knew. I said, “so you think, you put some lipstick on her, some pantyhose, and she’s magically going to look heterosexual? You don’t think she is what she is, what she has to be?”

Mathias laughed and laughed and laughed.

It was the only time he ever gave up on the argument.

Somehow, the argument, Mathias, seeing us through his eyes, my son in the dress, my wife who insisted the dress was meaningless, all combined to make me furious. Why was this happening to me? What was I going to tell Mathias?

When I saw him again, he instantly assured me that the dress meant nothing. “Women in my country, where my family comes from, dress their kids up like that all the time,” he said. “No big deal.”

The event sunk to the bottom of my mind, and percolated. Who had I been mad at? Why had I been mad? Was I afraid that someone who insisted that sexual preference was a lifestyle choice might think I was…making another gay? On purpose?

At the hieght of one of our endless arguments, Mathias had once shouted at me, “Don’t tell me who I can and can’t hate! I can hate gay people if I want to.” He went on to talk about all the times his mother had told him to suck it up, to act like a man. How hard it was, to be man. And why did gays get to just skip past all that? Why was that fair? Why had he been forced to be a man, and they could do any damn thing they pleased?

I liked Mathias. I’d known him for ten years. Before Oscar, the fact that he hated gays had been academic.

A few months later, I got into a stupid argument with him over a bit of business we’d both been involved in, and he never spoke to me again. I hurt his feelings. “We’re like family,” he said to me at one point. I apologized, but that was the end of the friendship.

I still don’t know, really, why I was so upset, or why I changed my mind. How I went from being humiliated at being seen with the boy in the dress to being proud of him. Proud of how pretty he looked, and how strong he was, taking the heat, putting himself out there, heart on his sleeve, unashamed and fearless.

I think I was just being selfish, about the friends I knew I would lose, the people who would think less of me. I was anticipating ten thousand awkward conversations, a million shaking heads. I had yet to get over myself. Your child is not an extension of your personality. As Kahil Gilbran said, Our children come through us, not from us.

You didn’t make your child. You cannot unmake him. Eventually, somehow, you accept, your child and your own imperfect love for him, your own limitations, your own selfishness. On the other side there is no more shame. Only pride.

And fearlessness.

Tagged as: "gender variant"