Love Dares You: Following My Kid's Lead
Learning to follow my gender nonconforming kid's lead.
NOTE: This post was originally written in 2016 and uses my child’s birth name and she/her pronouns, both of which are no longer acceptable. I am sharing here for parents who may be at the start of their own work with their kid, not as an invitation to use this name or these pronouns for my kid.
I sometimes imagine people reading anything I write and getting just past the first line or two before taking a deep breath and exhaling an irritated sigh.
Maybe they roll their eyes.
“Oh, this again,” I can almost hear in my ear. “Man, why can’t you just let it go.”
Truth be told, I wonder that myself sometimes. Not because I feel as a nation we’re at a place where anyone who is interested in social justice, in equality, can relax and say, “Ahh, it’ll all work out.” More because I’ve always been quiet, stunted my voice with a need to be perceived as likable or good.
I am not naturally subversive.
At least on the surface, which is sometimes where it counts.
When I write about Sabine, I often find myself pausing, pushing delete, backspacing … pausing, writing, … backspacing. Which, interestingly, is exactly how many (though many more who don’t) want to deal with her. Recognition. Backspace. Confusion. Delete.
She’s not transgender. Yet. She is gender non-conforming. Although I am never sure the individual experiences are different. In other words: I am never sure she doesn’t—even if loosely—simply experience the world as a transgender child.
I try to parse the difference out. In maybe some of the same harmful ways others do.
“You do not compute.” That’s what I sometimes see scrawled across the face of folks who have this desperate need to want things and people to be what they expect, what they’ve been carefully groomed to anticipate.
My feelings are magnified to infinity. We each carry our own histories. Backbreaking and impossibly oppressive at times. At 44, I’ve been under the magnifying glass long enough to know when it’s time to adapt in order to avoid the harsh, unforgiving, focused light that burns.
Scorched Earth.
Jacqueline Rose, in a long, beautiful essay about trans narratives, punched me in the gut with this idea about ambiguity in reference to gender identity: “At a conference in Philadelphia attended by Margaret Talbot, the journalist who wrote about Skylar, one woman admitted that she was the one who needed to know: ‘We want to know—are you trans or not?’”
That’s me, as a parent.
Ashamedly, yes. But with at the very least an edge of the very same need to protect my child that all parents feel. I want to know because I want to understand the world I need to prepare Sabine for, as one is going to be (right now) distinctly more cruel (potentially) than the other, or others.
So, for me, everything she says and does becomes a clue, and in ways my need for investigative, internally interrogatory thought makes me a decidedly less effective parent, if (sometimes) more effective advocate.
I both gain and lose ground.
Coming up our back stairs, she tells me to call her “John.” She’s playing, continuing a game she started in our alley with a a fairly simple request: “Pretend you don’t know me, mom.”
There’s not a kid in the universe that hasn’t played this game. Distancing yourself from your parents, gaining independence, even if the world where you are alone and someone new is completely imaginary. There’s a danger and excitement to thinking about yourself as someone other than yourself.
“Hi, John,” I say.
I close our back door. Wait. Wait. Wait.
“You coming?” I ask, opening the door and calling out to her. Is that panic in my voice? I hear her feet on the back steps. I think I probably should have let her go a minute or two more. Let her figure out the next move.
“Yeah,” she tells me. Retreating. Back up the steps, into our condo.
Here’s my mistake: “Do you want to be called John,” I ask. There’s a serious edge to my voice that for all my own chiding and self-scolding, I can’t seem to tame.
She’s noncommittal. In this moment, she wants to be both: Sabine and John.
And there’s the word I want to set my sights on, focus my attention and let myself, for once, breath in a space that isn’t constrained by anything beyond: Here is my child, in this moment, right now.
Instead of reading her being both Sabine and John as playful, her working out her own ambiguity, her truly not knowing—or her truly not caring, to be more precise—I think to myself: “She wants to be a boy.”
When really, she (as Jacquline Rose and many others will attest to) may just be returning the focus to where, if we’re all honest with ourselves, we belong: People who can experience a wide range of emotions and identities that, left unlabeled and untethered to ideologies and expectations that are almost always socially instead of biologically constructed, can span great distances without moral implications. Male, female, gay, straight, all, none, one, two.
In my effort to always honor her truth, I begin to find one of my own: My love, my extraordinary respect for my daughter, sometimes acts as a stranglehold on her ability to develop her own sense of self.
In this way, unconditional love can be a burden, as limiting as it is limitless.
Ironically, I find myself banished to the very ambiguity I work against. An ambiguity that, because of our sometimes strict adherence to a binary world that doesn’t really serve anyone, or at the least doesn’t serve everyone, feels urgent and anxious, unnatural.
When really, we all have our own paradoxes, right? Some of which, with time, come to be more definitive, solid. Others that remain gray, fuzzier, less distinct. Neither of which deserve any less respect. None of which make us any less human.
Human.
Not less than.
Ever.
I will go to my grave not knowing every part of myself completely and wholly. There are parts of myself I will continually deny or distort (that’s just the truth), just as there are parts of myself I’ll continue to discover and recognize. This much I know, and this much I’m OK with knowing.
And this: You can’t ever assume you truly understand someone else’s identity or experience. Ever.
Ever.
But you can try to dismantle some of your well-tended presumptions.
Because the people who take you to the edge of what you recognize, dangle you over and dare you to stare wide-eyed without judgment, are, almost always, the most vulnerable, the people most in need—and most deserving—of protection.