If you’re the type of person who liked to think of themselves as hip; creative; bohemian, unbound by convention, having your first kid can be a humbling experience. Because as it happens, you enter a world of norms.
You find yourself saying the things that everyone says, cliches you might call them, if they didn’t express your most deeply felt emotions. As in the time that you look into your first-born son’s unexpected and equisitely blue eyes, and know that your life is forever changed. That you will never be the same.
After awhile, you get used to it. Life is filled with an endless parade of needful things. If you’re lucky, you have family around to help, or friends going through the same thing at the same time. Maybe you buy a house. Look for a school. Like it or not, you flow into a norm. Maybe you resist the lure of the suburbs; do the family bed, whatever. Sure, you’re still a rebel. Hah. Finally you accept that in some ways, you are normal, and that is a perfectly fine thing to be.
Then your son won’t take off the princess dress at daycare; at preschool; in kindergarten. Whatever your feelings about this, the reality is, you aren’t there, and you can’t stop it. After months or years of total immersion with you, your kids are having social experiences with other kids, and you think it’s good for them.
And all the teachers laugh and tell you the tutu doesn’t mean a thing.
And as you emerge, as an accepting, supportive parent, you find you’ve left Kansas far behind. You aren’t normal anymore. Thehomilies other parents sling at you at the park—How pretty your older girl is; how different daughters are from sons. Oh, all the ways boys are nothing like girls! And girls are nothing like boys!
No, you’re not normal at all.
In fact, until you find a support group, you are one of the loneliest people on the planet; your kid seems to0 young, and too happy, to be permanently labeled transgender or gay, but his focus, intense, unending focus, on cross-gendered play, is certainly something. So there follows, the internet searches, the therapists, the books, the soul-searching.
Now you’re more bohemian than you ever had any intention of being.
My wife and attended a PFLAG event a five minute walk from our house, made up exclusively of same-sex parents and gender normative children. We were pleasant to each other. We didn’t feel welcomed or accepted, particularly. We had nothing to bond over.
We were so lucky, that our parents came on-board quickly, instantly. My mother-in-law had come to grips with her own son’s homosexuality years before. My parents were a pair of retired university professors. The worst you could say about my parents was how sorry they seemed to feel for us; this extra layer of concern and fear, layered on top of your own.
Eventually we found support, in the form of the mailing lists which you can find in the ‘Resources for Parents’ sidebar of this blog.
And we both found we could breathe again. We hadn’t realized we’d been holding our breaths, for years, but we had been. Other kids like ours, other families, like ours. Kids older, kids younger, kids the same age. So many similarities; our kids seemed cut from the cloth. This is one of the ways people are.
And mostly, our kids are happy, or they start out happy. No one has told them to hate themselves for being who they are. Yet. And it’s your job to try to stop that from happening, and to make sure you kid knows, when it does happen, that it’s the other kid who is being the jerk.
Little kids are supposed to do what you tell them to do. You dress them, you feed them, you socialize them. So, when a kid does something weird, well, it’s the parent’s fault, isn’t it? Unless of course, the condition has a name. Tourettes, ADD, Asperger’s, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) .
If you want to justify your kids oddness, you better pick a name, and figure out what story you’re telling. And then, you worry about the parents who think you are a over-reacting hypochondriacal ninny creating a self-fullfilling prophecy. Then there’s the parade of bulllshit psychogenic explanations. Too much mom! Not enough dad! Abuse! Bad parenting! Permissiveness! Utopian egalitarianism!
You learn how to talk about your kid, how to explain them, when to explain them, and when to smile and nod and keep moving. People glaze over, they freeze up, they are nice, they are too nice. Preschool, Kindergarten, first grade, second, third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh…then.
Puberty. Your little boy-girl, who passed so perfectly for so long, no longer looks like these budding young women. He has the long hair, the clothes, the gestures, but he’s all angles, sharp edges. And now, when people see him, they don’t see a little girl, or a boy with a crazy parent, they see…the rock star.
David Bowie or Marc Bolan, Spinal Tap or Led Zepplin; Glam or Emo, it doesn’t matter. Because tweenagers and teenagers don’t do what you tell them to, and your kid is just another one of them. The parents would have judged you a few years back now commiserate.
According to the experts, many gender non-conforming children eventually identify as gay, and as they figure this out, the cross-dressing changes, goes away, by itself. If your son is emerging as a gay man, he learns that being a princess isnt a good way to attract another gay man. At least, that is what the experts tell me. (But I see something a bit more nuanced. Our kids are redefining what it means, to be gay, to be straight, or they will. Soon.)
Some gender variant kids figure out that they must go on to interventions; hormones, blockers, eventually surgeries. For them, puberty is a nightmare, as their androgynous bodies betray them. I’ve met some of these kids, and once you do, you know; this is real, this isn’t crazy, this makes sense. These kids need these interventions, and the results are amazing. I’ve met girls born as boys, boys born as girls, and they are as Girl, or as Boy, as any girl or boy you’re likely to meet.
But for many of us, we find ourselves suddenly and unexpectedly doubling back on normalcy. Well, normalcy 2.0.
Your little girl is now a rock star. A teenager. Kids these days!
What are you going to do?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
You know, I was feeling so guilty for being so grateful J.C. Penney’s was out of the butt-ugly boy’s dress shoes my 9 y.o. wanted yesterday…but reading this reminds me that she swings from one end to the other all the time. And that’s okay. And it’ll be even more okay as she gets older. Thanks for keeping this blog
Oh, and you should see her pictures in drag as Thomas Edison
This is one of the most interesting posts on gender variance I’ve read in a long time. My spouse is MTF whom I fell in love with during the he-looking young rock star moment. She is now the proud papa/mama of our twin girls. People assume we are a lesbian couple. When I was teaching at an all-girls’ school there was a hot young FTM who the other girls were gaga for. It was like she was Edward Cullen, cute, dangerous, irresistable.
Speaking of rock stars, I thought you’d find this blog entry interesting. It’s written by a MTF rock star in a metal band, and is pretty interesting. I actually think the best thing about it is the comments at the end. I really like the ones from Brad, as he admits to not really understanding the whole thing – but he really wants to, and is interested and thoughtful in his questions and responses regarding gender issues.
http://decibelmagazine.com/Content.aspx?ncid=343143
good article. the details on the transition process are interesting; I’m glad she found her community to be supportive. Thanks for the link.