The Beauty of Bending the Binary
The early years of navigating gender with my trans child.
NOTE: This post was originally written in 2017 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.
“That’s so funny!” she told me, laying next to me as we scrolled through countless pictures of her as a toddler, kid, the young person she is today. As she begins to push against upcoming changes, growth, she nurses a strong infatuation with herself as a baby.
She notices the sunglasses. She notices the hair that looks a little weird. She traces her puffy cheeks with the tip of her finger, almost as though she’s gray-haired and wrinkled now, reflecting on her life, the nostalgia of youth trailing down my phone screen. All that’s missing are those years of experience she’s not yet accumulated.
“Will I always be the little baby?” she asks, jutting her lower lip out for affect. This question is standard, like clockwork, when we’re looking at these pictures. “Yes,” I answer. “You’ll always be my little baby.”
What she never mentions when looking at the photo are the two things she must now recognize as hallmarks of girlhood and femininity: her dress and sandals.
We’ll get back to that, though.
I find memories of my own girlhood in some of her stories, like a familiar scent you catch on the air for short, singular moments. The challenges of my childhood pale in comparison to some of my daughter’s, and where I chose to surrender she chooses to stand up. I’m not ashamed to admit she has more integrity and character than I did at her age, maybe even more than I do now.
I can speak these truths because being her mother has made me more honest with myself. Or, maybe I feel like I can’t afford to be less than honest with myself anymore. Looking back, looking forward, in the present, now, there isn’t any perspective from which I can watch her in this world and not reconcile both my own strengths and my own weaknesses. Both are immediately apparent. The value of this unyielding earnestness is I can inventory my weaknesses and promise to work against their known outcomes.
To wit, this weakness: I’m ashamed at how many times I think she’s going to be disappointed or hurt or rejected only to realize I’m remembering my own experience instead of truly considering hers. A defensive skill I sharpened throughout my life: Assume you won’t be liked, picked, voted for, accepted and you’ve guarded yourself from the consequence of rejection. Mainly, the confirmation that you are not good enough, smart enough, wanted.
True, those consequences aren’t foregone conclusions. For me, they’re more a complex working of my own self-image that rooted as shyness, grew to insecurity and bloomed into vicious self-doubt.
I don’t want that for her. I’ve never wanted that for her. My burgeoning sense of self-awareness binds my tongue and pushes the fear and anxiety to the back of my throat where I swallow them whole.
In knowing Sabine, miraculously, I’ve come to know myself, too.
Watching her navigate gender these past years, live wholly, at this moment, in gender nonconformity, I realize how fraught my own relationship with feminine is, was, perhaps always will be.
Girl is so tightly scripted. Some of the things about myself I always considered weird were, more precisely, me bumping up against my own sense of feminine. Short hair, combat boots paired with Laura Ashley dresses, army pants and homemade beaded chokers. I wasn’t exactly at odds with my gender. I revolted, as many do, pushing back against and expanding boundaries in ways of little consequence. They always contracted back, even more narrow and constricting.
But not nearly as limiting as they are today. Now, gender roles are so strict and unforgiving that there’s very little room in public space to maneuver on either side — or in the middle, or outside—without censure. Feminine or girl meant very little to me before puberty. But today, most everything and everyone is stamped from early childhood and difference is too little deemed valuable and too often named deviant.
Looking back at me, looking now at her, I understand my rebellion was more experiment than true defection. I was always looking for a way back in, a way to more wholly inhabit feminine in the ways that this world signaled were good and valued, desired. I never quite got there.
Still, I relinquished my freedom without a fight.
Sabine did not.
My bumping up against is Sabine’s buckling under and rising above. I say buckle under not as some acceptance of defeat but rather to mark the endurance and strength required in resistance. I notice the way the questions and the looks and the doubt and disgust wear on her and I’m powerless to make them ineffective.
But unlike me, she relinquishes next to nothing of herself.
She stands committed to being who she is—nothing about her is false. She lives under a microscope of arbitrary morality that has little if any real interest in goodness but a deep-seated fixation with maintaining status quo, feeding the dominant culture and discourse. She’s felt the stares. She’s heard the exasperated gasps and behind-the-hand whispers. She’s been asked countless times if she’s a boy or a girl and, after answering, has heard just as often: “No you’re not.”
When thinking of what she bears, I once drew a picture of a kid slowly bending under a mountain of question marks, sinking lower and lower until they disappeared into the ground. As her mother, that’s how I imagined her experience. No matter my support, the advocacy, she was still being trampled by expectation, misunderstanding, hatred.
Thinking back, I should have added eyes alongside those question marks.
In college, my senior project explored the eye as a central image in three Shakespeare plays. Though there was (is) much to be fascinated by in Shakespeare, I found myself continuously drawn to how central observation is in much of his work. People watch and spy in order to discern truth and shore up their sense of reality or explore that gray area where we have to grapple with what is real, as well as how we decide.
Hamlet is a perfect example. With the exception of Hamlet’s soliloquies, the dramatic effect in almost every scene depends on someone watching or listening. Hamlet watching Gertrude. Hamlet watching Claudius. Claudius and Polonius watching Hamlet and Ophelia. Everyone watching the players.
All these years laters, I’m again thinking about the power of observation as I watch Sabine in this world. (My use of “watch” isn’t lost on me). There are always eyes on her, peeking and prodding, looking for a truth they are seldom entitled to, a truth that might not even exist as they need or are accustomed to believing truth exists.
Eyes that dissect, suspicious—when I’m generous I might say curious — and calculating. Short hair, boy. T-shirt or sports jersey, boy. Jeans, boy. Cap, almost always turned backward, boy.
The problem, as Shakespeare was also brilliant at confronting, is that looking, observation, rarely tell you the whole story. In part, this attitude is a product of his time. Elizabethans believed the senses were fallible, so the idea that you needed to question, turn over again and again what you witnessed to determine its veracity, was natural and necessary.
Not so today.
So many of us are ready to let truth be determined by our own preconceived understanding of this world, of people, that we rarely step back and hold what we believe to be true up for closer examination. Worse, we don’t hold ourselves accountable for that work. Instead, we demand that what and who run contrary to our own understanding answer for themselves.
And it’s almost always a trick question: We aren’t looking to listen. We’re looking to contradict, to disagree, to prove a point.
When I ask Sabine how she’d like me to respond to folks who misgender her, the answer she gives me doesn’t catch me off guard though does make me … sad seems too small a word for the feeling: “I literally don’t care.”
She knows what “literally” means and is answering honestly. I try not to impose my life experience on her when talking gender, in either word or deed, but I also know she’s telling me a half-truth. I’m certain she truly doesn’t care how or if I intervene. The reason she doesn’t care, though, that’s the rub for me.
Because tucked in that answer is a whispered confession: I am giving some of my control about who I am over to those who question who I am.
The truth—the inspected and turned round and round and looked at from every perspective truth—is that Sabine never thought she wasn’t a girl until people started telling her she wasn’t a girl.
In her younger days (she’s 10, so younger here means 4, 5, maybe 6), when she more often than not encountered honest mistakes versus purposeful denial about her non conformity, she would actively self-advocate without question that her truth, the truth she lived, was real and worthy of defense.
I heard her more than once tell a friend who misgendered her: “Hey, you know I’m a girl.”
That’s markedly different from “I literally don’t care.”
This newfound(ish) indifference, the giving over of herself, affirms for me that these denials of her person are working. She’s actively questioning who she is because she’s had so many other people actively question who she is.
Do I need to remind you that she’s 10?
When she goes quiet, I know that for her silence is self-preservation. People can’t erase what they don’t know exists, so by gliding through spaces neither affirming nor denying what is assumed about her, she’s afforded herself some peace, given herself a way to just be, which is all she’s wanted, is all she wants.
I understand the impulse even as I’m saddened by the thought that this kid, my kid, my beautiful, genuine, inspired kid, finds some of her only sense of security in the very same way she’s been made to feel insecure: self-denial in place of self-determination.
Recently, I asked her to come with me to a Trans Liberation Protest in our home city of Chicago. I made a sign that said “Proud Mom of a GNC Kid.” I asked her if she was OK with my identifying her as gender nonconforming because I wanted to give her the opportunity to correct me or to tell me flat out she didn’t want me to carry a sign about her.
She didn’t (correct me), except to say that she’d prefer if labels weren’t necessary at all.
I think about that, how attached I am to giving her a voice, somehow, in any way I can, until she feels like using her own again. How urgent doing so feels even when I stumble in execution. I also think about how that any way, for me, needs to mean something definitive, active, recognized, by her (if only reluctantly). GNC. Trans. Agender. Non-binary. The infinite ways there are to categorize I, as incongruent with the idea of I (individual) the act of categorizing seems to be.
I sit waiting for our pizza. She’s at home. When I get there, the back door widening, she says what she always says: “Hey Mom.” I answer as I always answer: “Hi Sabine.”
On the garbage can — I don’t dare overthink if that placement is symbolic — is the sign she holds in the above photo. I imagine her, alone, briefly, reclaiming herself, partially, wholly, I’m not sure. I don’t think she’s sure, but she’s sure enough now, in this moment. Maybe.
I focus on her use of proud and GNC.
She is gender nonconforming. For now.
It’s silly, maybe, but I feel like that in choosing to make that sign she was also making a small gesture toward honoring herself once again, staking claim, closing her fist, however loosely, around the questions and the intrusions as if to say that today, she’s not giving another inch.
Still, I know she doesn’t like the label, may be working her way through her own understanding of who she is, and who she is will change, necessarily, though perhaps not around gender, though perhaps around gender, too.
I occasionally entertain the notion that if people had to look my kid in the eyes and tell her she is less deserving of human rights, civil rights, they’d be unable to, in part because it’s so much more difficult to say despicable things to a person’s face, but also because they’d come to understand that she is, as she’s always only ever wanted to be, just a kid trying to navigate a world that’s hard enough already without having to deny nearly every last thing that makes her, her.
But maybe I’m missing the point. Well, some of the point. Maybe along with really seeing her I also need people to truly see themselves, task themselves with questioning their own assumed truths, taking apart what they think they know and pouring over it with the same zeal they pour over my daughter’s person.
Because if they could do that work, that hard, sometime uncomfortable work, they’d find we’re all, in many ways, fluid beings, born capable of great change, of steady growth, of need, and will and desire, deserving of full, visible, humanity as we inch and ease our way through this life, to the end, true to ourselves.
Our true selves.