My Slate piece is now on-line.
I would like to apologize profusely to Johnny Weir for my casual and wrong comment on his identity which I had read somewhere, but not double-checked. He is a wonderful human being, his communication with our children was perfect, compassionate, affirming. I am ashamed to have made any presumptions about him.
Also I confess to being taken aback at some of the comments, even though some raise valid points. The editorial process shifted the focus of the piece slightly, and the title is off-putting, though perhaps more news-worthy. My use of pronoun reflects the confusion and day-to-day reality of parents struggling with a changing growing child, and a changing growing awareness of that child’s identity.
I am most upset that my own relationship to the word ‘normal’ is so enraging . I have used the word normal to mean “like 90% of the population.” The notion that normal is good, that people want to be normal, is foreign to me, but then, as a white-het-male, if I reject that privilege, I also can’t empathize with what it would be like to be forever denied it.
Great people, artists, writers, activists, persecuted minorities, in my mind, have always been more than normal and I have aspired to be with them; separate and by virtue of that struggle, somewhat superior to the great normative mass of humanity. I know this view is in itself romantic and in its own way, patronizing.
But it is how I feel, and it is where that language comes from.
I want to thank everyone for all their wonderful and moving and inspiring comments over the last few years, and I want to apologize to them for taking the few negative comments so to heart. It’s another flaw in my nature I struggle with, as I struggle with my Bipolar difference, and other things.
Read the piece in the spirit it was intended, if you can. I have to take responsibility for the edit that has gone to print. I did my best.
p.s. I am no longer going to use the word normal in the context of gender; I’ll use CID-tendered. normal is scientifically accurate and culturally unusable. I was in part attempting to capture the parent’s experience of leaving the world of the 90-99 percent majority using a word that that majority understood.
glbtq is natural; natural can be seen as normal, even when rare.
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