“Check this out.”
My thirteen year old son has created a model of himself in the free 3d program MMD. The model is based on a teenaged japanese anime girl, which Oscar has given his signature, bright yellow, black-tipped eared, Pokeman hat, his shoulder length brown hair, and his blue blue eyes.
“Nice,” I say.
“I’ll have to figure out how to get rid of the breasts, but basically it’s done.”
Inside, the tiny voice says, “huh. his avatar doesn’t have breasts. Data point.” I smile at that voice, that part of myself, which still can’t help noticing, logging, commenting on, the degree to which my son’s behaviors conform to, and diverge from, gender norms.
The figure on screen dances, the camera zooms, pans, swirls, the techno dance music plays. The dance isn’t particularly provocative (thankfully) ; it’s intricate and hypnotic, and as the figure dances, Oscar copies the moves. As we walk down the street later, he periodically makes the hand movements. I copy him for a few moments until he looks at me in exasperation.
“It’s not cool when you do it, Dad. Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.”
Almost as tall as me, his voice changing, he’s growing up. As a boy, now. There was a time when I was certain that we would be intervening in this growth, on his behalf, using hormone blockers to delay puberty, and female hormones when the time was right for that. And even though I’ve been wrong to date, there is no guarantee that we won’t find ourselves in that position someday. If we do, it will be after puberty has permanently marked his body as male.
Hormones won’t make a six foot two person any shorter; won’t narrow the shoulders; won’t shrink the hands or feet. The changes coursing through my son are natural, inevitable, and mostly, irreversible. His growth as inevitable as the storyline the mainstream media creates for gender non-conforming kids. (Awkward Segue). The new ABC special on transgender kids has come, and gone, and I haven’t seen it yet, but it seems to fit into the pattern created by the media culture, which is both supportive, and exploitative, of gender atypical kids and the Controversy.
The Controversy! Should we intervene? How early is too early? Did God make a mistake? (Fundamentalists who have no problem accepting conjoined twins and intersex people, for some reason find a brain/body mismatch inconceivable.) Important questions, but… Broken record time. I’ll repeat myself.
Focusing exclusively on the most extreme cases of gender dysphoria polarizes this issue in a way that I think does a disservice to the very people that the coverage claims to be supporting. If every boy in a dress or girl with a crew cut is seen as being on their way to a transexual outcome, then marginally informed people suddenly get the feeling that This Is Going Too Far! People beginning to grudgingly accept homosexuality as a normal outcome are suddenly acutely uncomfortable again. We must save the politically correct liberal moon bat intellectual’s children from the insidious agenda!
It’s just a Barbie for god’s sake, don’t cut the boy’s penis off! Try substituting a GI Joe with a fabulous wardrobe!
So, to say it again. Most (not all) gay people recall having gender atypical interests as kids, and were suppressed to some degree. There are ten to a hundred times more gay people than people who seek transexual surgeries. Most gender atypical kids norm themselves nearing puberty and emerge later on as gay. There’s no way to tell which kids will be gay and which will be trans, but to listen to them and to try to hold as many options open to them as possible for as long a period a time as possible.
As some parents ease up on the suppression, we’re seeing new childhoods. New normal childhoods. And though it is too early to say for us specifically, we can say definitely, as a group, we are beginning to see gay childhoods of a new type. Less unhappy, less closeted, less contentious, less stressful, less destructive. Honest childhoods for a population which has, until now, been forced to live a kind of lie. There’s no evidence that accepting a kid, allowing them to express gender atypical interest, alters their trajectories. In our support group, we have seen that letting the boy play in the tutu doesn’t make him trans; it doesn’t even always make him gay. The tutu doesn’t make the child.
The child simply is. And all we have to do is let them be. Easier said than done. But who ever said being a parent was going to be easy, eh?
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Such truth. We need to let our kids be themselves.
So glad to see that he has support even if he’s not fitting the gender binary. Some of us are gender queer; not quite one or the other mentally, somewhere in the muddled middle, no matter what our bodies say. I think that might be more difficult for some parents to take than being the “wrong” gender. Because the “wrong” gender can be surgically fixed… but not wanting to embrace fully either one can’t.
I think you expressing the changing outlook on all these matters, that people can start out a bit free-er than previous generations were able to. We’re not there yet, but it’s coming. I just had that thought this week, so I found it interesting you touched on it, that the boy in a skirt, or girl with a crew cut says nothing about their sexuality or eventual preference, per the individual, but one can only make the statement that he likes the freedom of the skirt, she the coolness of air on her scalp. That’s it. Nothing deeper than that.
There are none of us, except of course perhaps the overly fearful or self-inferior feeling that do not express SOME forms of intergender behavior, whether that means a boy with his hip out and hand backward on it while talking to you, or a girl who eschews typical girl play, or hates dresses. It could take the form of liking fingernail polish on a boy’s hand or toes, or a girl who hates nail polish because it’s too frou-frou for her. We are conceived from both male and female, and as such have both traits in us, some expressed so more than others. It is social structure that says boys do this (All boys) or girls are like this (ALL girls) and that simply is not true. It is way too much generalization, and it’s hurting us as a society to move forward.
But society hates anyone outside the norm, it brings I think some sort of unconscious fear for survival, as if the odd ones will bring the group of us to the attention of the predatory meat eaters, and unfortunately the “odd” ones won’t be the ones eaten. At random, the T-Rex might just reach down and pluck one of us out for a tender noon day snack. So better for all to fit in, keep your head down, camoflage (sp?) if you will, so that it increases our odds of survival.
I just found your blog and am quite impressed. I am a 55 year old gay man who wished I’d had a dad like you. It is not easy being a trailblazer. Not knowing where on the gender and sexuality spectrum your child will settle is a tough uncertainty to deal with. I have been involved in working with LGBT youth since the end of th 1980′s. I know of many youth who would have been thrilled to have a dad like you. Just keep being a source of unconditional love and support and you and your son will weather whatever storms lie ahead.
Thanks for your comment. I feel bad that people let something like sexual orientation or gender identity get in the way of parental love. I’m happy to have wriggled free of some of my cultural programming. When you look at someone like Dick Cheney being supportive, you realize, it’s possible. One doesn’t have to be a saint. At all. My parents were college professors, and though we never spoke of GLBTQ stuff, they never demonized anyone. Except Nixon. Heh.
I do think that Oscar is being a bit more gaurded. I don’t think the final chapter has been written. He hasn’t come out as anything at this point. He’s a teenager, wrestling with this stuff. But he has friends and he has the memory of being accepted as a girl, and a boy, and hopefully, that helps.