* * *
That summer in D.C. was filled with a great deal of learning for me, the kind that brings painful self-awareness with it. At first, I avoided my Columbia Heights neighborhood, returning to my apartment only to sleep, spending my time in the “hip” neighborhoods whose demographics were much more in line with what I’d grown up in (that is, mostly white). But after a few weeks, I began to steal glances at what I’d been avoiding, the way I’d check for monsters in my room as a kid by opening one eye at a time. I started to tell the truth to myself: You don’t like it here because you are unbelievably spoiled. All these black and brown people make you uncomfortable even though you are a brown person yourself. Even then, it seemed ridiculous that I should have to remind myself of the color of my skin, but I’d spent so much time trying to fit into the company of whites that without the presence of whiteness to remind me of my brownness, I’d defaulted to a crude form of self-protection: thinking of myself as white.
There is no beautiful story that I can trot out to tie a big, shiny bow on this summer of personal realization, no heartwarming aha moment. I tried to craft one in graduate school, and my professor and several classmates called me out, further evidence that these kinds of shifts are ongoing, the work of continued pushing and awareness, not a “one and done” epiphany. Yes, I began shopping at the local grocery store instead of taking the train to Whole Foods; yes, I became friendly with some of the neighbors who would greet me as I walked to and from the Metro. But what really happened that summer was that I began the very long process of learning how to fully live inside of my brown skin, a process in which I am very much still engaged. My assumption had been that my internship would teach me all kinds of things, but in the end, it was my neighborhood that did.
(Not) Passing
On a Saturday morning in July, just a few weeks before he would turn five, Shiv told me that he “actually wasn’t born a boy.” We were minutes away from leaving the house, on our way to meet friends for a children’s theater production of The Wizard of Oz; Shiv had gotten himself dressed first (in shorts and a T-shirt), but when I walked out of my bedroom wearing a sundress, he asked, “Can I wear a dress, too?”
This in and of itself was not unusual—for years, Shiv has shown an interest in dresses, wigs, dolls, and other items traditionally marked as being “for girls.” But he demonstrated this interest while also identifying as a boy. While he would often play-pretend as a girl (usually some kind of superhero), he had never before shared anything that indicated he experienced himself as female on the inside. And because his exterior expression ran the gamut, my wife and I were purposeful not to assume that his interest in and enjoyment of “girl things” necessarily corresponded to Shiv being gendered differently. Except now he seemed to be introducing the possibility.
“I’m actually a girl. So please don’t say ‘yes sir’ to me.” He spoke as if testing out the idea, running it by me to see how I would respond.
“Okay,” I said in what I hoped was an even, neutral tone, buying time as I helped him slip on his own sundress, thinking carefully about how to respond. He’s making a request, asking for what he needs. That’s a good thing, it means he feels empowered to do that. I need to show support, not argue or contradict. Maybe ask for clarification?
“So, no more saying ‘yes sir.’ But can we still use your name? Is it okay to keep calling you Shiv?”
He thought for a split second, then nodded while answering, “Yes!” Before I could take the conversation any further, Shiv and his attention bounced away from me and into the kitchen, where he proceeded to check himself out in the mirror. Reeling slightly but not wanting it to show, I took a deep breath and packed up my purse, pausing to text my friend Holly; we were on our way to meet up with her and her three sons. Shiv had played at their house several times, but always while wearing his “boy” clothes. I knew he was slightly nervous to wear a dress around them for the first time, so we rehearsed his standard response to questions or comments—It’s my choice to wear a dress and I like it—and I also promised him I’d give Holly a heads-up. I had no doubt she would be supportive and that the boys would follow her lead, but like all kids, they swim around in the same expectation-filled water as everyone else, the water inside which no one would bat an eye at me showing up to the theater in a dress but would goggle when Shiv did.
Shiv has always had strong opinions about his personal style. He asked to wear a dress when he was one month shy of his third birthday and began wearing a T-shirt on his head (declaring that it was his “hair”) around the same time. What first seemed like a quirk or a phase to Jill and me has evolved in our parental understanding into something more significant; accordingly, we have worked to give Shiv a good measure of freedom and autonomy in how he dresses and in his diva-esque aspirations. We both had parents—her mom, my dad—who either objected to or attempted to control our appearance (for her, clothes and for me, hair) and because of those sour memories are committed to not doing the same.
We have set a few limits: certain clothes are reserved for special occasions (“no wearing fancy dresses to school”) and sometimes, practical logistics overrule aesthetic considerations—“no wigs in the shower or pool.” Jill and I often check with each other to make sure that the limitations we’re imposing have a logical and not emotional basis. Do we have a genuinely good reason for this restriction? Would we be implementing this rule if our child were a girl? Are we trying to codify something simply to reduce hassle, or to protect Shiv, and is either one of those necessarily a bad thing?
For instance: I work out at the gym about three or four times a week, and since Shiv was about eight months old, I’ve taken him with me. The kids’ club there is cheap and convenient and has exposed him to more cartoon movies than I previously knew even existed. Thankfully, Shiv generally spends his time there clambering around the play structure or joining in the antics of whoever else happens to be there. From the start, I instituted a rule: No “hair” in the kids’ club. By now it’s standard procedure. Shiv removes his shirt hair in the car before we go inside the gym; then I help him put it back on when we return to the car. I’ve always claimed this had a practical motive—Oh, it’ll come off while you’re playing and I won’t be there to fix it for you—but the truth is that I was worried he would be made fun of and I wouldn’t be there to back him up. It’s one thing for Shiv to dress unusually when Jill or I can be with him, or even when he’s at his school, which we chose precisely because it is such an open, supportive environment. But leaving him with a group of kids I don’t know, without any confidence in the willingness of the kids’ club attendants (usually in their early twenties, with various levels of enthusiasm for supervising small children) to intervene on his behalf, feels entirely different. Now that he’s five, I think he could handle whatever talk might come his way, but when he was a three-year-old, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I created a rule designed to protect him. That’s what parents do, right? Then why do I feel so conflicted about it?
* * *
Shiv is old enough to know the “rules” of gender conformity, to have internalized the codes even though we routinely remind him that in our family we don’t believe in them. Still, he occasionally trots out some maxim he’s heard from who-knows-where: Girls can’t do that! or That’s only for boys! Kids his age are committed to absolutes, understanding the world in black and white, but ironically, Shiv’s own self-expression demonstrates that there’s a whole lotta gray. Whenever he parrots out one of these conventional gender stereotypes, it’s almost as if he expects us to contradict him, and wants us to. Remind me again that this isn’t the truth. Reassure me there’s another way.
Kids push boundaries, both to assert independence and to understand where the limits are—or, in Shiv’s case, to make their own limits. So far, Shiv has made his wardrobe choices based on a combination of pride and pragmatism, with a blazing certainty about what he wants and what makes him feel good. A few weeks ago, gettin
g dressed for school, he picked out a sleeveless pink shirt with fringe and silver writing on it, plus blue shirt hair and a bright blue pair of shorts. That afternoon, I needed to run an errand after picking him up from school, and he walked right into Home Depot holding my hand without any sense that we were entering a mainstay of binary, gendered, mainstream American culture. Even though half of the customers at Home Depot (and its rival, Lowe’s) are women, I still always feel that I don’t belong there, like the male contractors and employees are looking at me with a kind of patronizing skepticism, prepared to jump in and mansplain home improvement to me. But Shiv comes with no such baggage; I am routinely awed by his lack of self-consciousness.
Still, there are times when others get to him or when he alters his appearance in anticipation of being laughed at. This seems to be happening more frequently as he gets older, perhaps because he is noticing things he didn’t always notice before. Recently, we were leaving the park holding hands and walked past a group of kids sitting at picnic tables. As we passed by, Shiv turned his head back, finally asking me when we got to our car: “Why that boy lookin’ at me like that?”
Shiv was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, shirt hair, and a pink tutu over his shorts; the boy in question, who looked to be about ten years old, was, in fact, staring at Shiv, and not in a friendly way. There was a part of me that was tempted to tell Shiv, Oh, he’s looking at you because your outfit is so cool! He’s probably just jealous! But then I thought about my own experiences being stared at as a kid because of my skin color. I thought about adults telling me I was imagining things or insisting that looks from others were positive or neutral, even though intuitively I knew that they weren’t.
Don’t dismiss his experience, I admonished myself. And don’t try to fix it. Instead, I asked him a question. “How did it make you feel for that boy to look at you like that?”
“Sad,” he said.
“I’m sorry, buddy. I understand why you felt sad. Sometimes people look at me funny because of my hair, because they aren’t used to seeing a woman with a shaved head, and sometimes it makes me feel angry.”
“What do you do?”
“Well, I try to remember that I feel good about my hair, that I like it the way it is, and that’s what matters. Do you feel good about your outfit?”
“Yes.”
“Then that’s what’s most important. And Mommy supports you no matter what.”
Was it enough? I’m never sure. How to explain to a five-year-old that some people view others violating social norms as a personal affront? How to explain that Shiv pushes the buttons of those who have forgotten that these norms were constructed and not handed down from on high? How to tell him that there probably is an element of jealousy involved, a kind of envy at the bravery it takes to cross the lines? I think of my friend Christian, admitting that despite being a committed ally who chose to go to Pride with his wife, he still felt super uncomfortable with the guy standing nearby in a thong.
* * *
Most days, Shiv matches and resembles so much of what people (mostly moms) seem to be referring to when they use the hashtags #allboy or #suchaboy. For one thing, he looks the part: physically sturdy and broad shouldered, with thick, muscular thighs. He howls with laughter when he farts during a quiet family moment and thinks the word “poop” is hilarious. He prefers peeing outside to peeing in the toilet. His feet stink, he eats more food during a growth spurt than seems either healthy or humanly possible, and he has the ability to turn nearly any household object into an imaginary weapon of some sort. For the last year-plus, he’s been obsessed with superheroes and comic book characters; Jill and I are often conscripted into Let’s go get the bad guys! play-pretend. Accordingly, Jill has perfected the art of making toy swords and nunchucks (which Shiv, for a time, called “nutchucks,” a misnomer so delightful we decided not to correct it) out of paper towel rolls, newspaper, a roll of kitchen twine, and duct tape. Yesterday, he greeted us at breakfast by yelling in his grumpiest voice, “Ugh, my bathroom smells like vagina!” probably because I’d just thrown a tampon away in there. In short, he can be such a dude.
And yet I spent at least an hour that same day constructing dress-up outfits according to Shiv’s specifications: wrapping a gauzy pink scarf around his body to make the strapless dress he had requested, thanking my years of sari-wearing experience for teaching me how to fold and pleat fabric and also how to open a safety pin with my mouth. (Attempt at your own risk.) From there, I was conscripted to construct a “veil, like a lady wears at a wedding” using another scarf, this one bright blue with a copper pattern and beaded edge. Once satisfied, Shiv walked slowly around the house, the long train dragging behind him on the floor. An hour or so later, the strapless dress had morphed into a pink-scarf skirt to which Shiv had added an old bikini top of mine, with the veil still going strong. Thusly dressed, he helped me make the icing for Jill’s birthday cake.
Shiv seems to know, intuitively, that gender is performative. He occupies different incarnations of himself at different times—naming him after a Hindu god has proved appropriate. He’s learned to code-switch gender markers without being explicitly instructed to do so. At times, he’s so insistent on wearing a dress or a skirt, so fixated on how his hair looks, and other times he’s perfectly happy to throw on a T-shirt and baggy athletic shorts. I can’t track his choices, nor do I suppose I need to, but I am curious. Is he calculating potential hassle? Deciding it’s not worth the risk? Or am I attributing causality where there is none?
It’s been a month since Shiv’s declaration that he is “actually a girl,” and I feel like I’ve been on heightened alert. Is it the fact that I’m paying closer attention, or is it because of the culture’s larger conversation around transgender rights, transphobia, and bathrooms? It’s like learning a new word and then hearing it wherever you go. I’m not asserting that Shiv is transgender or will identify that way; I will wait for him to articulate his own sense of who he is. But considering the cues he’s offered so far (cues that have not, up to this point, included a request for a shift in the pronouns used to refer to him), this is no phase—I am the parent of a gender-nonconforming child. And because he is black, Shiv will be more susceptible to misconceptions, prejudice, and violence than a white child in the same position. With that knowledge, I have to fight against my instinct to move immediately into fear or despair. Look at how hostile the territory is! Think how hard it will be for him!
That kind of parental panic is something I’d previously experienced only from a child’s perspective: as immigrants, my parents came with an extra layer of uncertainty and concern about the world I was being raised in. Add to that the fact that I am an only child, and you can appreciate the weight of parental expectation I carried on my shoulders. By and large, I met or exceeded the expectations my parents had for me, until, in one very distinct way, I failed. Recently, I came across a copy of a multipage, handwritten letter that my father sent me in college. He mailed me the original, but I didn’t keep it; as far as letters go, this one was a decidedly unpleasant read. But apparently he made a copy of the letter before sending it, which my mom discovered in a drawer after he died. I have lots of letters and cards from him, sweet ones—birthday cards, letters he sent to me at summer camp—and I look at those from time to time. But the copy of this letter, the Letter, I keep only out of my commitment to maintaining a personal archive.
The letter is essentially a plea to “make a different choice” when it came to my “lifestyle,” my father’s last-ditch attempt to convince me that it wasn’t too late to settle down, marry some nice man, and have a couple kids. His disappointment and shame are palpable; he could not understand why I was “doing this” to my parents, why I would opt to make all our lives “so difficult.” With his words, he laid out a choice, although not the one he was referring to; the choice was about which I would put first, my true self or my relationship with my parents, particularly my dad. (My mother was also upset about my sexuality, but she
did not draw such a hard line.) I had not wanted to make that choice, but his letter forced my hand. There was no question of abandoning my life with Jill or the sense of self I’d worked so hard to discover. That letter created a deep rift between my father and me, which did not fully heal before his sudden death several years later.
I still find it painful to read, as I tend to focus on the best parts of my father as I grieve for him; it is hurtful to remember this selfish and manipulative side of him, this moment when his love became conditional. My father was a wonderful man, someone whom I love and miss tremendously, but he screwed up here. And now I am desperate to make sure that my fear or selfishness or sense of wouldn’t it just be easier if…? does not allow me to make the same mistake with my child. My desperation pushes me to hold my head higher, to fight against my upbringing as the good immigrant daughter who was taught not to take up too much space, not to make myself any more conspicuous than I already was. Rather than urging Shiv to be more cautious, I hope that being his mama makes me more brave.
* * *
I seek out books when I need guidance, and in the past few weeks I have been more grateful than ever for my public library and the internet. I’ve purchased Who Am I?, a book for kids that nicely explains the distinction between gender and sex, and Gender Born, Gender Made, a book for parents and caregivers, with case studies and clinical data. I deliberately left these books out around our house on the day of Shiv’s birthday party, knowing that about a dozen kids and their parents would be coming over for homemade sno-cones and a backyard bounce house. The books served as a kind of litmus test, helping me see how the people in Shiv’s life were likely to respond to his developing sense of identity. Jill and I agree: we cannot make the world safe, but we can make our home safe and insist that anyone who comes into it is supportive of his choices, whatever they may be.
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