If you were ever truly sad as a child, every child suicide tears at your heart, in a personal way. There but for the grace of God. Every story triggers a burst of anger, awakens a residue of tweenage or teenage despair. Child time, a time when the present was more present, and the future impossibly far away, the past only a few clear bright years fading into half-forgotten family snapshots.
Critics of the “It Gets Better,” campaign point out how little consolation the future is for a kid trapped in a horrible now.
“Don’t let them bring you down,” you think. “Don’t listen. Don’t believe what they say. Be true, to yourself. Know your worth, know your value, know that you are loved, no matter what. Don’t let those people into your heart, into your soul.”
You want to raise your kid like that. If you’re a certain kind of person, you probably want your kid to be strong, politically, too. You don’t want to raise canon fodder. You don’t want to raise a yes-man, an enabler. You don’t want to raise a kid who says at Nuremburg, that he was only following orders.
As I sit with my near-hysterical thirteen year old boy, wrestling with him, verbally, trying to control my own visceral, mounting rage, trying to get him to do his algebra homework, something inside laughs. Mission accomplished!
My son doesn’t care what other people think about him! He has his friends, his peeps, his interests, his passions. School isn’t one of them. He doesn’t care about grades. They’re meaningless made up numbers. He doesn’t care about numbers. They’re boring.
In our support groups, we hear from the parents whose kids are self-censoring, in hiding. They are trying to act gender normative, but the clothes don’t fit. They’re aping normalcy, living lives of quiet desperation, with the only flashes of joy or authenticity coming in unguarded moments of gender-non conformity; a moment with a hat, makeup, a dress, a book or comic or TV show.
This has not been our problem; at least, we don’t think it has been.
We have heard, read the work of, and consulted with the professionals who have noticed that a majority of gender-non conforming kids start to conform more and more around puberty, and emerge as gay at some point afterwards. And so, as we fell into this pattern, we were prepared, and we’ve watched it all, aware that any any moment, a crisis could propel us into the world of psychiatry and hormonal intervention.
The moment never came.
And now, in that part of my brain that continuously stares into the abyss, I acknowledge that my child may eventually seek to change his body, and have a less positive outcome, because we have accepted him as he was, in broader culture where people are compelled to be male or female, and not a bit of both. We didn’t push, and so, he didn’t push back. Maybe in that struggle, the true self would have emerged more fully, demanded pronouns and blockers. Maybe.
But I have friends in the community, with kids now on hormone blockers, who know, that if history is any guide, that they are on a path towards full hormonal and surgical transition. Sure, the blockers can be removed at at any time, and a completely normative biological gender will develop, but to date, no one who has started blockers has ever done this. So these parents know, as I know, that they have passed an important milestone. And we wonder about the road not taken.
We’ve supported the child we had, the way he was, and took him at his word.
Acceptance has been easier, as it turns out, than non-acceptance. I say, to my son, you can be the person you were meant to be, and do your goddamned math homework like everyone else. And we can sit in anger and watch it not get done, together. Can he do it, though? Neuropysch consults and ADHD testing, a new normalcy to confront, another movement, neurodiversity, emerging to counter the medicalization and stigmatization of certain types of brains by other types of brains. The cold hard reality of the declining American economy, the necessity of higher-education in the Brave New World that is coming, where our kids may be able to marry as they will, but never find a job that pays a living wage.
And so, during our son’s evaluation, after the dismal homework output is sliced and diced, when we’re told of our son befriending the new kids, the lost kids, the kids in trouble, helping them, showing compassion above and beyond the ordinary, we both brush back tears, because really, we were never like that as kids. We only wish we had been.
For there is no good without a corresponding bad, no freedom without responsibility, no world where you aren’t arguing with your teenage child about something or another. So I think, we try to make sure we’re arguing about something that matters. And that the argument doesn’t get so heated, that love gets lost.
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