January 2010

Oscar has shot up in that pre-adolescent growth spurt, now a foot taller than his childhood friend, Rachel. His mom’s shoes are casual, unisex; it’s not the gender but the size I’m talking about here, for a change. Oscar is just growing up.

At 11, Oscar has trimmed his waist length, dirty blond hair to his shoulders. The winter cold always knocks him out of skirts, so we can’t really gauge his gender sense by that. The pink and black phase continues, and he favors color coordinated outfits with hats. His current obsession is Tamagotchis, a decade old technology fad which, while once embraced by many American tween-age girls, is now passe.

But then, Oscar never really cares what other people think. Well, he does, but he doesn’t make him change his mind, about what he likes, what he thinks is cool. He does wish more people were into Tamagotchis. The force of his obsession drives kids around him to buy them too—to be his friend. Kids give him old ones they’re tired of; then ask for them back.

The gender play now is different…exaggerated posing and posturing in an affected ‘valley girl’ accent which seems to have come from nowhere…this broad, swishy / femme stuff that would have driven me up the wall five years ago, which is now an or ordinary part of the world, like my younger son’s hyper focus and distractibility.

Oscar subverts gender by coloring between his eyebrows with a brown sharpie, creating a ferocious uni-brow which clashes with his still-delicate features. He looks like a deranged, girly caveman. He has a another character with a curling black magic marker moustache, a french magician.

His friends are boys and girls, and there are play dates with both boys and girls, but always one on one. His personality is a bit different, with the different friends. But then, isn’t that true of all of us?

I bring his hand to my face, and rub it across the stubble. “You are going to have one of these. A beard. What do you think about that?” He laughs or shrugs. “I can shave!”

At the bowling alley last week, the attendant asked, ‘boys or girls,’ when I told him the shoe size. I kept saying, “It doesn’t matter,” and he kept looking over my shoulder at the child in the pink coat with the long hair, the blue eyes, the delicate features. I was annoyed; this was happening again? Somehow, this had not happened in what seemed like a long time. Oscar has been in his school for 7 years; people knew him or knew of him. Our neighbors, the other families at the bus stop, had all been read the white paper.

But here it was again.

Finally we got the shoes; unisex shoes, but the sizes are embossed into the heel twice; one number is the girl size; one number is the boy size. So the attendent wasn’t asking what gender Oscar was; he just wanted to clarify what size I needed, given that gender was built right into the size number.

Because even the unisex bowling shoes really aren’t. Unisex.

We’re gendered creatures, and we project our understanding of gender onto everything around us. Those in the bender binary can’t grasp, viscerally, what life is like for those outside it. For us, transgender will always be a foreign language we learn painstakingly, and speak poorly.

Our children exist as a quantum blur of possible outcomes, possible futures.  My kid is blurred in a way that most kids aren’t, but in the end, it is no big deal. I understand him in more ways than I don’t. We share a lot.

I’ll love him, perhaps with a clumsy accent. And he’ll forgive me for being old, and out of it.

Straight? Gay? Crossdresser? Transgender?

It doesn’t matter. We’ll take it as it comes.

He can walk in his mother’s or his father’s shoes.

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