Anne has another safe place in mind if things fall apart where she is. She’s figured out exactly how she’ll move and what she’ll do. When I suggested that she talk to school administrators about why she couldn’t provide references for a new teaching job, she replied, “I will work at a gas station before I tell anyone my child is transgender.” We walked up through the trailer park to meet the school bus. Three exuberant children bounded out and ran to hug Anne. She stood there, so soon after our long, tearful talk, wrapped in all those young arms, and she burst out laughing.
“I don’t love my daughter less for mourning over this,” she said that evening. “But I miss my mom. I miss my sister. My daddy’s grave is back there, and I just have to hope other people are putting flowers on it. I miss my dog. I miss my students. I feel really guilty because I’m still hung up on all this stuff that we left behind. I should just let that go. But it makes me so angry that these people have taken our lives from us.” Then Anne smiled again, as though she couldn’t really help herself. “You can’t grieve all the time when you’ve got your kids. You see how far they’ve come, and they reach you right in your heart. That moment when they come off the bus is one of my best moments. My other is when they get up in the morning, and they collide on top of me. So, regret? No. I miss the things that were in the old life. But if I knew this was going to happen, I would still adopt Kelly. I’m the lucky one. Because, honestly, if it weren’t for Kelly coming into my life, I would never have entered this bigger, more beautiful world, where I’ve met you and so many other wonderful people. I would still be married to a man for the next twenty years. I mean, if you just look at it, Kelly has brought more blessings into my life than I could possibly give back to her.”
• • •
In 1990, Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, a book that rocked the idea of the gender binary. In 1999, in a new introduction, she wrote, “One might wonder what use ‘opening up possibilities’ finally is, but no one who has understood what it is to live in the social world as what is ‘impossible,’ illegible, unrealizable, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to pose that question.” Two decades after the book’s publication, those possibilities are open wider even than Butler hoped. When a friend of mine, a professor at a Midwestern university, was pregnant with my goddaughter, one of her students volunteered that she was planning to name her first child Avery because “I just thought Avery is a nice, ungendered name that my kid could keep if he or she ended up a different gender from the one he or she got born as.” Norman Spack described similar conversations, calling them “a new era of ‘no variant person left behind.’” Playfulness about gender is much more commonplace than it used to be. “To some extent, transgenderism has become a fad,” Meyer-Bahlburg said. This observation conformed with my experience. I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.
Michele Angello explained that one of her ten-year-old clients says, “I know I’m a boy, but I don’t want boy toys. I don’t want boy clothes except to go to school.” Most of his friends are girls. Angello asked, “What do you imagine for yourself as an adult?” He said, “I’ll probably be a dad who sometimes likes to be a girl and sometimes likes to be a boy.” Angello explained, “That’s drastically different from the nine-year-old male-bodied kid who comes in and says, ‘I want to be a mommy when I grow up.’” Such children imagine themselves past convention. The imagining would once have been questioned; now, it is often the convention that is reassessed.
Belonging is one of the things that makes life bearable, and it can be tough to look at a binary world and choose against both sides. A therapist who works with children with various challenges told me that it’s much harder to be ambidextrous than it is to be left-handed. Sometimes, idiosyncrasy can be a pose, membership in the smaller club of the anticlub, but often it is a marooned consciousness that occurs not because genderqueer is a cool thing to be, but because neither the duality nor the spectrum fits. Such experiences express the wide vision that lies outside of belonging.
• • •
When I met Bridget McCourt in 2009, her son, Matt, was seven and a half and had been dressing as a girl for three years. He had long, beautiful, blond hair and a distinctly boyish manner. When Bridget first agreed to buy him some dresses at Goodwill, she thought they would be just for dress-up, but that was not what Matt had in mind. A few weeks later, it was time to pick out fall clothes. “I let him decide what clothes he wanted,” Bridget said. “He went to the girls department and was consistent about wanting girl clothes. I just thought, ‘We’ll take this day by day.’ He pretty clearly says that he is a boy. He’s comfortable with his body, but he likes girl things. He’s irked by the labeling. I have told him, ‘Matt, if I were told I couldn’t wear pants, that would feel so limiting to me. So I can understand that you would feel the same way about dresses.’”
Someone who doesn’t conform to the stereotypes of his gender, but who identifies with it nonetheless, has no clear path. When I met Matt, he looked like a long-haired boy in a dress. Older trans people who don’t appear to inhabit their gender look sad; whenever I saw someone who looked like a middle-aged man in a dress, I felt an ache. In a child, the effect was curiously transfixing, as though he had just imagined himself into being. “For a long while, it was important to him for people to know he was a boy,” Bridget said. “At the park, he would come over to me with a kid and say, ‘Mom, tell them.’ He now realizes that it’s just easier to let someone who meets him for five minutes refer to him as she.” I wondered if Bridget feared for his physical safety. “I worry more about his losing the confidence to be himself,” she said. “It would pain me to see him fold inward.”
• • •
An almost constant tension exists between the accommodations a trans child will make to the norms of the world, and the accommodations the world will make to the norms of a trans child. When Nicole Osman took her daughter, Anneke, to see Santa Claus at a local mall, she was worried that Santa would either look at Anneke and call her a boy, which would be upsetting, or would look at her name and promise her girlish toys, which would be even worse. She tried to explain the possible problem to Anneke, but Anneke said, “Santa knows who I am, and Santa knows what I like.” Nicole saw Christmas falling apart. Then she spotted an elf who was keeping the crowd amused while they waited. She took him aside and asked him to get the message to the big guy: Anneke was a girl, and she wanted boy-type toys. Nicole asked me wryly, “Has anyone else you’ve interviewed had to bribe the elf?”
At four, Anneke said she wanted a short haircut. Nicole suggested a bob, but Anneke wanted a crew cut like her father’s. People started mistaking her for a boy. Nicole worried that this would upset Anneke, but Nicole’s correcting people was what upset Anneke. At school, Anneke was marginalized by the girls because she wanted to play with trucks and was into soccer, and by the boys because she was a girl. Her father, Ben, was worried. “Since nobody would play with her, I’d show up with a soccer ball at recess, and we would start a game,” he said. “One by one, people would join the game. I would slowly pull out, and pretty soon everyone wanted to play with her.” Nicole said, “I told her, ‘I don’t shave my legs; I don’t wear makeup; I’m not this princess girl. There’s some really amazing, cool girls that are athletic and they like soccer. Then there’s a few girls who feel like there’s just been a really, really big mistake, that they really should have been born a boy.’ There was this long pause, and I was totally expecting her to say, ‘Well, I’m one of those cool girls.’ She said, ‘I think there’s been a big mistake.’”
I met Anneke when she was twelve and a half. Her presentation was masculine but she regarded herself as female. Anneke had discov
ered herself in ice hockey. “At hockey, I’m more masculine,” she said. “But sometimes I do feel more of a girl at school, because the boys are weird. I want to pick things from each gender. Lately, I’ve been thinking about taking testosterone, but still playing hockey with girls and being a girl, but having the deeper voice. It’s just a thought.” Although Anneke did not want to transition or live as a man, she also didn’t want to develop breasts, and she was taking Lupron. “I’m very open to my friends that I am taking a shot, and that’s why I’m not going into puberty and all that.”
Nicole and Ben had always had somewhat unorthodox arrangements. Nicole worked full-time, while Ben stayed home with Anneke and her little sister. “We’ve played with those roles a lot,” Nicole said. “But the fluidity is challenging. Some days, Anneke goes in the girls’ bathroom, some days in the boys’ bathroom. That is still so outside the norm.” Anneke said, “Everyone’s different, right? Other people’s way of being different could be being able to skateboard across America or being able to swim for half an hour without stopping. My thing is being different in a gender-fluid way. On the soccer field of life, I’m just not a goalie; I’m a midfielder. I’m me, and that’s who I am.”
• • •
When Vicky and Chet Pearsall took their son out, people usually thought he was a girl. “His dad was an all-American soccer player and professional skier,” said Vicky. “Hugh never liked balls. At two, his favorite thing was to wear my red high heels, a towel on his head for hair, and anything he could drape as a sari.” As Hugh grew up, Chet tried to set limits. He would tell Hugh that he couldn’t go out dressed in girlish clothes, and when Hugh asked why not, Chet said, “You’ve got a penis.” Hugh said, “Well, let’s get rid of that.” Chet was appalled. Vicky read that most children who want to change gender don’t like themselves. Not Hugh. “Hugh thought he was the cat’s meow,” she said. Vicky and Chet joined a monthly support group. “You’d have a father break down and cry and tell the story of ripping the Barbie doll out of his son’s hand, tearing the head off. Everybody came into this group and thought they had this really unique experience with their child, and it was so textbook. The kids did the same exact things.” Vicky’s concern was how to prevent her child from being traumatized. “I would always ask the trans people who came in to speak to us, ‘What did you want to hear from your mom and dad?’ They’d start sobbing. I was amazed by the cruelty.”
When Hugh was eight, he began to be conscious of other people’s take on him. “He started to edit his behavior a lot more,” Vicky said. “He’s been a happy kid, but there have been times where he has felt really alone, particularly from fourth to sixth grade.” At ten, Hugh set up shop as a jeweler, working with semiprecious stones, and quickly found an online market for his creations. Within two years, he had started a business designing handbags as well. “Since about twelve, he’s been very conscious of the signals he’s sending,” Vicky said. “It’s not ‘Bring it on,’ but it’s ‘I know what I’m doing.’ My husband was concerned about his getting beaten up. We enrolled him in tae kwon do classes when he was ten, and this May, he’s going to have his black belt.” When Hugh was applying to switch schools in ninth grade, before each interview he’d discuss with his mother which bag he should take for his papers—it could be a bag that looked like a briefcase, or it could be something wild. Before one interview, he chose a pink Prada document bag. He was admitted to the school.
By the time I met Vicky, Hugh was fourteen and almost six feet tall, and he was still being mistaken for a girl; it was in his body language and the tilt of his head. Vicky found the idea of surgery upsetting, but would have supported him if he’d gone that way; but he had shown no interest in it. His parents’ acceptance of his gender play had not pushed him into transition, any more than their playing ball with him would have turned him into a jock. “When he was little, I just couldn’t figure it out,” Vicky said. “All we really had to figure out was how to get to the point where we were no longer self-conscious about what who he is says about who we are.”
• • •
Emmy Werner, one of the founders of the field of positive psychology, has written a great deal about gender roles and their relationship to resilience and has found that resilient children overcome traditional gender roles altogether. “The males can be very assertive, but they’re also willing to cry when crying is called for. The women can be very nurturant, but they’re also very independent and autonomous. Rearing children in very traditional sex-roles may not be very helpful when it comes to meeting life’s emergencies.”
In the world of gender, what was progressive two years ago is conservative today; Brill cites as an example a mother in Oakland who filed a complaint alleging that the school’s embracing policy toward transgender students didn’t specifically address the concerns of gender-fluid children. Some trans people are disturbed by this evolution. Renée Richards, who fought for the right to play professional women’s tennis after transitioning in the 1970s, said, “God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity. I don’t like the kids that are experimenting,” and then, “I didn’t want to be a trans in the middle of something, a third sex or something that’s crazy and freakish and not real.” Richards’s certainty that God did intend people to be trans the way she is trans, but not the way some other people want to be trans, suggests an intimacy with the Creator that strains credulity. In 2011, the performer Justin Vivian Bond spoke of transitioning without surgery. “I like my penis, and I am keeping it, but I am creating a transbody—a physical record on my body and a medical record that I am a transgender person. I am turned on by people who are genuinely themselves. It’s not nature versus nurture. It’s nurturing your nature.”
• • •
When he was still Emma, Eli Rood didn’t hate her female body, and she didn’t feel that she’d have to kill herself if she couldn’t gain access to hormones and surgery. Emma had a good life as a butch lesbian. When she became a man, he was not particularly masculine. Eli has both male and female virtues, and altering his body did not enormously change them. Eli Rood seemed to have transitioned simply because it felt logical; despite a mental health diagnosis of GID, he had taken his gender change as an occasion for clarity.
Emma and her fraternal twin, Kate, grew up in Portland, Oregon. Their mother, Joanna, had become pregnant during a casual relationship and kept her babies. Emma came out as a lesbian; she had a fondness for neckties; she kept a crew cut. She bound her breasts moderately but not tightly and, at five feet seven inches, was read as male about half the time. She started college at fifteen. Joanna said, “I knew she was looking for her tribe, but I missed her. It was harder in some ways to have a child who was so gifted than to have a child who was gender nonconformist.”
At her college graduation, Emma came out to her mother and sister as trans. Reviewing it when we were all together, Joanna said, “It seemed like it hurt you, the process of thinking, ‘Maybe I’m kind of a freak.’ You were a great lesbian; you were good at it. You were very sad about this, and it was very scary.” Eli recalled, “I kept wondering, ‘Am I really trans?’ There was this classic narrative of people who have felt miserable, miserable, miserable, and I wasn’t. Finally my therapist said, ‘You don’t have to be totally miserable to pursue options to make yourself happier.’” In the summer of 2005, age twenty, Eli moved to New York and asked people to use his new name and pronouns. He found a job at the Columbia School of Social Work library, presenting as male. By April 2006, he wanted top surgery. His mother offered to pay half the costs, refinancing her car to do it. Eli grew a beard, as most transmen do to establish their gender beyond discussion. “There have been some testosterone-related emotional and mental changes, but it’s hard to gauge what’s totally endocrinology, and what’s psychosomatic,” he said. “I’ve lost some patience, and I get frustrated more easily. I have more trouble focusing, and my verbal fluency has declined. It took transitioning to realize how much I didn’t like my
body before. Transition is really a second adolescence. I feel very fortunate in coming at it right on the tail of my first one. I don’t regret that first puberty. It contributed to the richness of my experience.” He thought for a minute. “If I’d lived earlier, if it had been much, much harder to even think about transitioning, I might not have done it. I didn’t choose to have the desire to change. But I did choose to act on it. People make a decision to have chemotherapy or not. People make a decision to take antidepressants or not. That doesn’t mean they’re not sick with cancer or dangerously sad.”
Eli went to the New York City civil court for what should have been a straightforward name change. His request was denied by a judge who said he didn’t want to “adjudicate gender.” Legally, name changes can be denied only to those who are attempting to evade creditors or who want to dissociate themselves from a criminal record. “People come in all the time and change their name to Bunny Superstar,” Eli said. “I was changing mine from Emma to Elliot.” The judge wanted medical proof that Eli was changing his sex. He could have supplied it, but was outraged to be asked; the ACLU took the case, and the judge changed the name to Elliot.
Eli’s father, absent when he was growing up, always related better to men and, in Eli’s view, prefers having a son to a daughter. “He feels qualified to ladle out fatherly advice to a son like, ‘Don’t go out and get anyone pregnant,’” Eli said. “He actually said that. He was kidding. But it’s still kind of weird.” Joanna said, “My parents didn’t help me much; I educated myself. I was lucky that somehow I had the strength to make myself, and I’m lucky to have produced a child who had the strength to make himself.” Eli has struggled with whether to identify as trans or simply as male. “Some people say, ‘I’m a man with a transsexual history.’ That’s a nice turn of phrase. I’m with a woman I’ve been with for two years. She has dated men and women in the past. There are elements of our relationship that she calls ‘lesbionic,’ and she says she feels very lucky to have a boyfriend who’s familiar with the lesbian landscape. Both of us feel strongly that we’re not straight, so we don’t have a straight relationship even though I’m a guy and she’s a girl.” Later, Eli wrote, “I don’t feel like my gender has changed much. I’m the same slightly effete masculine person I’ve been for ages.”
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