transgender child

When He Was Very Young

by Bedford Hope on February 23, 2010

How much information is too much information for a child?

All parents struggle with the particulars. When do you tell your kids about the messy reality of birth? The mechanics of sex? Homosexuality? Transgender? Death? War? The Holocaust? Serial killers? 911? The Bomb? Sarah Palin?

If you read the parenting experts, they’ll tell you that frequently when kids ask questions they only need general answers. You don’t need to go into a ton of detail. Their feedback can let you know if you’ve told them as much as they need to know; as much as they can handle. If you’re the type to babble along, filling conversational voids, digging yourself in deeper and deeper, learning how to make a simple statement and wait for a reply can be a challenge.

I’ve had some problems in this area.

Like the time, when Oscar was in first grade, when he demanded a bit more detail on the whole birth story. So I told him, teaching him a few new words in the process. He looked non-plussed. Then I made the Big Mistake.

“You know, not every kid is knows about this stuff, different parents have different rules, and different kids are ready to learn this at different times. So don’t go running down the street screaming ‘babies come out of vaginas! Babies come out of vaginas!’

I don’t need to tell you what happened after that. More than once.

Eventually, we got a good, progressive sex book called It’s So Amazing, which fascinated my younger child when we read it together, and disgusted Oscar, my gender-non-conforming child. (Amusingly, the book features two parenthetical characters who react to the subject matter presented in exactly the same way, for kids to empathize with. It’s a really good book if you’re not a wack-job / hater / fundamentalist.)

You’ll find a lot resources out there for all the common stuff; sex and death and puberty; eating disorders and ADD and Aspergers.

When do you tell your gender non-conforming kid about transgender? About surgery and hormones? About the irrevocable decision at puberty; to block or not to block?

Oscar was finishing Kindergarten, wearing the boyskirt, when at the local coffee shop which I used to haunt, pre-kids, and which I still attempted to hang out in now and then with kids, I saw a male-bodied person going through what I assume was the real life test, though this person could easily have been a cross-dresser. In a very very low key way I pointed him out to Oscar, deciding the breech of etiquette was justified by the teaching opportunity. The guy didn’t pass, having broad shoulders, Adam’s apple, big hands and rugged features.

Outside he asked, “Why would a man wear woman’s clothing?”

Collecting myself I asked. “Why do you like girl stuff?”

So I told him about transgender; the real life test; blocking and surgery, in general terms. He said, “Oh.” I told him there was no hurry, and few people felt this need, and that there were lots of ways to be a boy, and I filled the silence with my babble before grinding to a halt.

And I realized that Oscar lived in the moment, a child, and this story I was telling about this man was just another boring grown up thing that he knew had nothing at all to do with him.

There are kids who have an a-ha moment at this, and start saving money in big mason jars for their GRS. I’m not kidding. Oscar wasn’t one of them. The event, like so many before it, a non-event, for us.

So I don’t know how young is too young; in the end I don’t think it matters, and in the experience of our community no one has ever really regretted their own personal decisions.  As long as you’re sensitive, and speak generally, and respond honestly to questions, provide context, and don’t sweat the details they aren’t asking for and don’t need.

Let them be the kids they are.

They grow up quickly enough.

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The Bathroom Battleground: gender variant kids and the call of nature

by admin on October 1, 2009

Leaky, the Bathroom Safety Bear says, GET OVER IT.

Leaky, the Bathroom Safety Bear says, GET OVER IT.

A few school systems, both public and private, have dealt with the issue of a transgendered child by notifying the school’s parents that a child, heretofore one gender, is now coming to school as the other. This is often met with howls of confusion and protest.

“What? Are the parents insane?

“Are they going to mutilate some poor kid because he played dress-up a few times?

“What about my kid! Dear Bog in heaven! Where will this boy-girl kid go to the bathroom?”

The furor usually dies down after a few points sink in:

  1. The child is under professional care. His parents didn’t dream up this treatment on a whim. Experts are involved.
  2. The child will use the nurse’s bathroom, or the handicapped bathroom, and accomodations will be made about  gym class.
  3. There will be no mass transgender indoctrination classes in which children are forced to cross dress against their will.

People calm down; Zeus does not appear to hurl lightning bolts into the bathroom stalls; life goes on. If sufficient anti-bullying measures (which benefit all children, outcasts and the bullies themselves alike) are in place, everything ends up OK.

In first grade, my son, hair to the middle of his back, in ‘gender neutral’ clothes, pants and shirts, some bought in the girls  department at Target, had bathroom problems. My son didn’t ‘socially transtion;’ he never presented as male in the first place, so there was no transition to make; he didn’t demand female pronouns, and so, after a few meetings with the school counselor, there was no school-wide announcement. Plans for some sort of mass education of the teaching staff fell by the wayside as major problems failed to materialize. The school’s existing anti-bullying polices seemed sufficient to the task of keeping my son safe.

Except, of course, in the bathroom.

“Girl in the boys room! Girl in the boy’s room” they would scream at him. He responded in a lady-like fashion by punching the gender cop in the nose. I made the first of many trips to the see the school vice Principal in charge of discipline.

Together with the schools gentle and wise counselor, we worked out the deal. Oscar would use the nurse’s bathroom. Across the sprawling mostly one story school building; easily a five minute brisk walk from his class. Everybody congratulated themselves. Problem solved!

A few years later, we discovered that Oscar was quietly, and with no difficulties, using the girl’s room next to his class. It wasn’t the official policy, but it was working. Until someone complained, well. If it aint broke…

Schools and public spaces need more family, handcapped, and unisex bathrooms. Basically single seaters with big stalls and safety bars, a locking door, a changing table, a sink and a mirror. These bathrooms help…everyone, they help everyone. They help families, parents who need to bring a child into the bathroom with them, for whatever reason. They help the handicapped. And the help the third genders, the trans, the people who get weird looks in the boys or girls, men’s or womens, room. In those inevitable moments of bathroom inequality, (the open men’s room and the clogged woman’s room.) this bathroom helps speed things along.

Family bathrooms; for all families, but especially for the families of kids who are different.

Kids in wheelchairs.

Tomgirls and tomboys.

Some trans kids who strongly identify as one sex or another probably won’t be satified by this—kids who pass easily will integrate into the restroom of their choice quietly. The family bathroom will operate for families as both a boon to the parents of infants—and as a fig leaf for an older generation which simply cannot imagine that their kids are quietly getting over who has the innie, and who has the outie, as they got over being black, as they are getting over being gay. Everyone feels the call of nature.

Everyone deserves a safe place to answer that call.

POSTSCRIPT: The Transgender Law Center has this PDF called “Peeing in Peace,” which discusses techniques and tactics for safely using bathrooms, and for advocating for sane bathroom policies in your community.

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