I belong to several wonderful, but different, on-line communities. Transfamily and TYFA, and the CNMC parent group (see side bars). Parents seem to be self-selecting, with many of the parents of gender variant but not transgender children ending up in one group, and the parents of transgender kids ending up in the others. In many ways, Oscar has straddled these two communities, as he has felt the freedom to claim a female presentation while retaining a mostly male identity.
So we’ve been oddballs in both communities.
I end up writing very long responses to parents of very young children, 3, or 4 or 5, who are sure their child is transgender. Because I assumed that Oscar was transgender at those ages, and it seems at age 11, that I was wrong.
I wrote this in response to the statement of a list-member, which seems intuitive enough, that the most extremely gender variant kids of course are the ones who end up eventually transitioning. The problem with this statement is that it isn’t always true.
As someone who presumed that my child was as extremely gender variant as it was possible to be, and who presumed I would be doing social transition and blockers, I’ll add a few thoughts that seem relevant.
“Barbies not babies.”
If this phrase seems to describe your MTF child, you may in fact be on the ‘pre-gay’ path. We also know that some kids insist they are girls because they are motivated to acquire the trappings of girldom; the hair, the clothes, the toys. What gender means to a five year old and what it means to a 12 year old can be very different. For some kids, this stuff IS gender.
This is why it’s so important to give it to them! Because if this does it, if this works, that’s a datapoint! Not the only datapoint, but a datapoint.
In the experience of some professionals, some of the most extremely flamboyantly hyper-feminine boys do turn out to be gay; and some genuinely trans kids are SO tuned into gender, and SO attuned to parental and societal pressure, that they self-supress nearly perfectly. They may overcorrect and be even more gender conforming than average. I tend to think that this sample comes from an earlier generation, but this is what I learned from Dr. Greg Lehne, a supportive professional, one of the experts in this area.
In his experience, some of the kids who seem the most incapable of suppressing their femme tendencies eventually emerge as gay, while genuinely transgender MTFs can suppress themselves and pass.
This fact was very counter-intuitive to me; in fact, it made me angry as hell when it was presented to me, as it seemed that every tangible, observable fact about my son could end up meaning one thing or the other.
A friend of mine, who had a child who we believe was genuinely transgender, described an incident where her kid spent hour upon hour rocking a baby doll to sleep, speaking to it, comforting it.
My child had a baby doll that was the color of mud, from being dragged around everywhere and unceremoniously hurled to the ground when he lost interest in it. My kid was never what you would call nurturing; I love him to pieces, but what he reminded me of sometimes, as a troublesome and somewhat irritable young child was an angry drag queen.
As we embrace our children and the people they are meant to be, remember the people in the middle of gender spectrum, who are also real. I believe there is a natural tendency for parents to either disregard gender variance as irrelevant or meaningless or a phase, or to presume that a child will transition.
We, the normative, are sometimes so scared of transvestites, cross-dressers, who we presume to be a sexual subculture, of the gender-ambiguous, so scared of what ‘those people’ go through, that we would rather our kids be one thing or the other. Especially when one learns that with early intervention that outcomes are so normative appearing.
Do you want your kid to be John Lithgow in the world according to Garp, or to look like one of the lovely perfectly passing teenage girls I’ve met who did early intervention? Obviously, you want the cute girl. The six foot six broad-shouldered girl in the miniskirt is terrifying. (At first. Not to me anymore.)
I personally do not believe there is any danger in going ‘too far,’ in terms of acceptance, and neither do many professionals, but some professionals disagree, and our side can’t really prove the idea that permitting a child totally autonomy doesn’t change his or her trajectory.
Gender lies at the core of identity, and our kids profit from being seen as who they really are. My kid isn’t ‘just’ gender variant; his gender identity isn’t some minor suppressible aspect of his personality; the fact that he isn’t interested in blockers or pronouns doesn’t make his identity any less real. He isn’t only someone who ‘hasn’t made up his mind yet.’ I am not a parent in denial.
The professionals I most respect in this field are the ones who admit how little we know at this stage; there is almost no research. These professionals have the most humility, the greatest tolerance for ambiguity, and are the least likely to jump to conclusions.
At one time this point of view, this absurd ambiguity, drove me nuts; if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck—then it’s a goddamn duck.
Except when it isn’t.
Human beings are not designed to live with ambiguity. It eats at us. A professional I know spoke of the couples with fertility problems who are told they cannot conceive, and the couples told they have the one in a hundred chance.
The ones who are told they can’t conceive process that information, adopt, or they don’t, and they eventually move on.
The one in a hundred people often live in a continuos state of discomfort, second guessing themselves and their decisions, alternating between resignation and indecision, and in short, are miserable. Because ambiguity is hard to deal with.
My kid could want to demand to transition tomorrow; or he could demand that we erase all evidence of his femme childhood in order to become more masculine, and thus, more desirable, within the gay male community.
Neither of these possibilities invalidates where we are now, how we got here, or changes where it is we eventually end up.
Keep an open mind, listen to your kid, seek help if you experience mental health issues, and realize that you have time to figure all this out.
Your support will buy you the time that you need to get it right.
Sincerely,
Bedford Hope
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