We Are Not Our Pasts

As time goes by, it becomes harder and harder for me to write about Oscar without violating his privacy. As he grows up, and struggles to create his own identity on-line, he defines himself, and no longer needs, or wants, me as an advocate, or greek chorus. I have to remember that my purposes in writing this blog have always been to a degree, selfish. I found that writing about this helped me understand myself, helped me grow, and added to my own self-esteem as the writing seemed to help others. I wrote for many years on gender exclusively for the members of my support group, the CNMC mailing list. I started this blog, with a thin veil of anonymity, in part because I felt like I didn’t want to flood the list with what was becoming something of a personal memoir.

Back then Oscar didn’t read much on-line, and neither did his friends.

After deleting a post which detailed the fascinating conversation between my son and a few of his friends in a car trip to the mall. (Kids open up with their friends in the car, somehow forgetting the parental presence at the wheel, as if we were robot chauffeurs.) I find myself wondering if it makes sense to keep writing these posts.

What is maddening to me is this paradox, that as we stand up for the rights of people not be defined by their pasts, or an accident of birth, kids like my kids erase their own histories, and the rhetorical playing field tilts. We’re left with the kids who identify only as the ‘transgender child,’ which acts as a kind of lightning rod for controversy and hardened hearts. If the popular understanding of the word ‘transgender’ wasn’t ‘sugical transexualism,’ this wouldn’t be the case, but at some point you have to admit a word means what most people think it means.

The media’s focus on the small percentage of gender-non-conforming kids who go on to surgeries and hormonal intervention may well be having the unintended consequence of even more extreme gender policing among the phobic. A generation of parents who have just barely wrapped their head around accepting the GLB are now left shaking in their boots staring at the T.

I’m torn between defending my son’s right to be the kid he was, with the reality of supporting the person he is now. Because, regardless of what he is now, and what he becomes, I think that those years were worth it, for all of us, my kid, my family, my community, the world.

No one should feel they have to live a lie. My kid hasn’t had to. No kid should.

But every kid has to navigate the realities of the moment. Many kids will choose to keep some things private. Many kids will emerge into the light only after decades of struggle, even if they have supportive families. Sometimes you have to hide, just to be. I’ve watched the agonies of other parents for years, those who had kids who self-censored, without really understanding that pain. I’m not sure I do even now, but I’m closer to understanding it. As I hear Oscar shrugging off wisecracks about his past from his friends.

So Oscar’s story, as told by Dad, may end here. I don’t know.

We are not our pasts. We define ourselves. Our parents are a just a greek chorus. Well-meaning, or otherwise.