Fridays my kids and I fight big-city, weekend traffic to make pilgrimages to suburban malls. Our adopted gay-uncle, (also decidedly not neuro-typical) and the kids aren’t impressed by shopping venues available via public transit. My tweenage, gender-nonconforming son, worships retail.
Playing chauffeur to both kids, I end up picking up Oscar and uncle on a street-corner outside the mall. As I wait at the curb I find myself studying a tall girl with shoulder length hair in a cinched dark navy coat. Then I experience the shock that so many feel on seeing my willowy, twelve year old boy.
The girl is my boy.
The coat is a gift from a neighbor; a beautiful thing rendered obsolete by the inevitable thickening of middle age. He smiles and waves and, zing, he’s my boy again, and we’re off to drop off his brother’s sudden and rare friend. Oscar’s brother isn’t exactly neurotypical. Our uncle connects to us at several levels, you see. But that’s a different story.
And it strikes me, watching Oscar later that night, putting on a YouTube character, a blue-lipsticked goth, that gender is a kind of costume we wear upon a common humanity which transcends male and female. We’re so tuned at ferreting out these differences that we fail to see the overlap, our shared humanity. Men and women are more alike than different, and the gender-queers confuse because our senses are honed to obscure this fundamental reality.
We are human beings, and our ultimate salvation lies in being humane.
{ 3 comments }
