At breakfast on the morning of Carol’s birthday, I found her furious and mournful. She handed me the Helena Independent Record, where a banner headline across the front page blared, “Helena Prodigal Son Returning as Woman,” and, below, “Former QB at HHS to present film telling story of sex change.” Kim was at a festival in Iceland and wouldn’t be arriving until the following day. When Carol and I went to the church to decorate for the festivities, the pastor said she had been in touch with the police to arrange safeguards in case of rioting or attacks. Carol threw up her hands. “The film was going to come here sooner or later, and I didn’t want it to just get booked into our local movie house, the Myrna Loy, and have no control over it,” she said. “This is the way it should come, at my church, where there is love. But those headlines cheapen it.” It is stressful to be stripped bare in front of a small town where you’ve lived your whole adulthood. Carol is not a show-off, or a lonely person, or a born activist, so she didn’t need to tell her story for the reasons that motivate many people. She said, “I know people who have had to look at accounts of their sons being arrested for child pornography, or embezzlement, and Kim has not hurt anyone; in fact, she has helped many people.” Nonetheless, she was visibly shaken.
The night of the screening, Plymouth Congregational was packed, with a long waiting list for tickets. I sat next to Carol in the back row, and she cried through much of the film and had to leave the sanctuary twice. When the film ended, Kim stood at the front of the church, and the audience began to applaud. A few people stood up, then a few more, and then it became a standing ovation. When it ended, Kim invited her mother up; Carol had composed her face into a smile by then, and as she walked briskly down the aisle, everyone stood up again, and when Carol arrived at the altar, she and Kim stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders while the audience continued cheering. Carol’s bravado had transformed the screening into an occasion of triumph. Now, Kim was the one crying. At the reception afterward, I told one of the church ladies that Kim had worried about the conversation the film would provoke, and the lady said, “Our hardest conversations aren’t with other people; they’re with ourselves. Once she had settled who she was in herself, we were ready to have whatever conversations we needed to make sure she knew this was always home.”
On Sunday, the pastor commented that she had never seen more congregants except at Christmas and Easter. The entire McKerrow clan was there; some had had to drive many hours from their farms. The service opened, “We pray today for your blessings on those who are abused for being who they are, and for those who are abusers.” Hymns were sung, the parable of the Prodigal Son was read, then Kim came forward. Although the parable is usually interpreted as a story about the father, she said, it is also a story about a son who receives a welcome he would never have dared to expect. She said, “The night before last, when our film was playing in here, I went outside to the columbarium where my father’s ashes rest. As I was kneeling there by what I call ‘Dad’s spot,’ I thought of the hours and hours of videotape that he shot lovingly of me during my football games, and how much of the same footage was now being shown inside this sanctuary. Now, it’s certainly not the context that any of us expected. But I knew Dad would be proud. And just then, the dusk breeze blew in this waft of sound, and it was strangely familiar to me, and I realized it was the crosstown football game coming from the stadium. The band was playing, and the announcer was bellowing, and all of these old tapes were playing inside here, on the screen, and I knew that new ones were being recorded just a few blocks away. Those recording their new memories to tape should be only so lucky as to be surprised by the last thing that they expected from their loved ones, only so fortunate as to get a chance to welcome them home with radical love. I thought about how all these cycles of lives would continue on, and so many aspects of my life coalesced in that one moment, that one beautiful, stunning, blessed moment, the past and the present, parent and child, male and female: the pain that life sometimes brings, and the soothing love that welcomes it with open arms, after its exhausting journey into a distant country.”
That afternoon after the service, Carol and I went for a long walk. I said, “Do you wish that Paul had just been happy to be Paul and had stayed that way?” Carol said, “Well, of course I do. It would have been easier for Paul, and for the rest of us. But the key phrase in there is ‘happy to be Paul.’ He wasn’t, and I am just so glad that he had the courage to do something about it. No, if he had been happy to be Paul, anybody would wish for that, but since he wasn’t—I can’t imagine the courage that it took. I had somebody say this weekend, ‘Carol, Paul died, and I haven’t finished mourning that.’ I don’t feel that. Kim is much more present to people than Paul ever was. Paul was never rude, he just wasn’t totally present. We didn’t quite have his attention.” She laughed, then said with adoring emphasis, “And look what we got! Kim!” And grace seemed to be both the cause and the consequence of her happiness in that emphatic declaration.
• • •
As I worked on this chapter, I kept returning in my mind to Tennyson’s beautiful tribute to Arthur Henry Hallam, in which he wrote, “And manhood fused with female grace / In such a sort, the child would twine / A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine, / And find his comfort in thy face.” Our received notions of masculinity and femininity are a modern conceit. Though Hallam was neither trans nor gay, his magnetism inhered in this blending of strength and gentleness, boldness and compassion. I remember first reading Tennyson’s lines when I was a teenager, thinking that he celebrated this friend for the very qualities that most troubled me in myself. I wanted to be something noble, not just a boy who had failed at real masculinity and was making do. I wanted to emulate what was best in my father and mother, in the life of the mind, to which men often stake first claim, and that of the heart, in which women usually have the upper hand. I saw in Tennyson’s bracing words an encomium not to an androgynous face, but to the intricate nature of beauty. Masculinity and femininity here seemed not locked in binary competition, but fused in collaboration. Anyone with an open heart should know that the world would have ended long ago without the translators who convey male and female meanings across gender’s fierce boundaries. It may be a recent phenomenon for that to be an identity, but what has changed is the characterization of such people—not their eternal merit, not their uncanny, necessary splendor.
I have a great life as a man and have made it all work, but I know that at twelve I’d have chosen to be a woman if it had been an easy and complete transformation. Perhaps that is only because being a woman looked more respectable to me than being a gay man, and twelve is a conformist age. I don’t regret not being a woman, any more than I regret not being a tough and easy football hero, or not being born into the British royal family; trans children usually believe they are already members of a different gender, and I never did. Being gay has worked out happily for me in the end, and since one lives in a continuous present, I don’t feel the afflictions I have resolved as permanent losses (though my last book was, after all, about depression; my path has had its challenges).
Yet I like to imagine a science-fiction future when gender-bending will not entail surgical procedures, hormone injections, and social disapprobation—a society in which everyone is able to choose his or her own gender at any time. Without physical trauma, such people would be fully of their affirmed gender, with an entirely functioning reproductive system and mind and heart of the self they believe is rightly theirs. If they wish to linger at the middle of a gender spectrum—physically, psychologically, or both—that, too, would be possible. In such a dreamtime, I believe that many people would opt to experience another gender. I’ve always loved travel, and if someone offered me a trip to the moon, I’d be there in an instant. What trip could be more fascinating and exotic than to know what it truly is to be your own opposite? Or, indeed, to live in some elusive territory to which there is no opposite? I’d plunk down my fortune if there were a round-t
rip ticket.
At the same time, I know that choice can be burdensome and exhausting and frightening—especially unaccustomed choice. My first book was about a group of Soviet artists, and I was with those artists when they came to the West. I remember one of them bursting into tears in a German supermarket that stocked twenty brands of butter because he couldn’t stomach all the decisions the West asked of him. A piece of me thinks that people are not good at choosing, that people who cannot do a competent job of voting in an electoral democracy, who have a record-high divorce rate, who fail to love children born because they didn’t organize birth control, would collapse if given full leeway to choose their gender. I likewise believe that choice is the only true luxury, that the striving inherent in decision-making gives decisions value. In modern America, choice is the aspirational currency, and even knowing the weariness selection entails, I like to imagine a future in which we would be able to choose everything. I’d quite possibly choose what I have now—and would love it even more for having done so.
XII
Father
I started this book to forgive my parents and ended it by becoming a parent. Understanding backward liberated me to live forward. I wanted to find out why I had experienced so much pain in my childhood, to understand what was my doing, what was my parents’, and what was the world’s. I felt I owed it to both my parents and myself to prove that we had been less than half the problem. In retrospect, it seems obvious that my research about parenting was also a means to subdue my anxieties about becoming a parent. But the mind works in mysterious ways, and if this was my secret purpose, it revealed itself only gradually.
I grew up afraid of illness and disability, inclined to avert my gaze from anyone who was too different—despite all the ways I knew myself to be different. This book helped me kill that bigoted impulse, which I had always known to be ugly. The obvious melancholy in the stories I heard should, perhaps, have made me shy away from paternity, but it had the opposite effect. Parenting had challenged these families, but almost none regretted it; they demonstrated that with enough emotional discipline and affective will, one could love anyone. I was comforted by this tutelage in acceptance, the reassurance that difficult love is no less a thing than easy love.
For a long time, children used to make me sad. The origin of my sadness was somewhat obscure to me, but I think it came most from how the absence of children in the lives of gay people had repeatedly been held up to me as my tragedy. Children were the most important thing in the world, and so they were mascots for my failure. My parents had encouraged me to marry a woman and have a family, and the world echoed that imperative. I spent years drifting between relationships with men and relationships with women. I loved some of the women with whom I was intimate, but if children hadn’t been part of the equation, I wouldn’t have bothered with the other half. The recognition that I was really gay came only when I understood that gayness was a matter not of behavior, but of identity.
When I was coming of age, that identity and being a father seemed incompatible. The unlikely prospect of being a gay parent troubled me then because I thought that growing up with a gay father would make my putative children figures of fun. This perception contained elements of internalized homophobia, but it was also consistent with social reality. I was learning to become militant on my own behalf, but was anxious about implicating others. As a child, I had been teased mercilessly for being different, and I didn’t want to foist a version of that experience on anyone else. In the twenty years that followed, social reality changed enough so that I no longer felt those compunctions. It changed largely because other gay people made the leap to having children before I was prepared to do so. Nonetheless, when I more recently expressed a wish for biological children, that wish was repeatedly devalued, often by people who reminded me earnestly that loads of abandoned children needed good homes. I was struck by how regularly these arguments were made by people who had produced biological progeny and had never contemplated adoption. The wish to create a child often struck other people as quaint or self-indulgent.
Since homosexuality does not appear to be transmissible, I was consigning my presumed children to the potential discomfort of coming from a strange place rather than of being a strange thing, and some critics felt that this mitigated the problem. I dislike the implication that since my children were likely to be straight, it was okay for me to produce them. Acceptance of horizontal identity only so long as it never becomes vertical is chauvinism. I would not have been dissuaded from having children if I had known that they were likely to be gay; nor was I dissuaded by the likelihood that they would be straight. Nonetheless, my apprehension about being a gay father far outstripped any concerns that a biological child of mine would be at risk for dyslexia, depression, or the types of cancer from which my mother and grandfather died.
• • •
The right to reproduce should be among the inalienable ones. Yet the prejudice against anomalous people is revealed most clearly when members of horizontal identity groups who have the potential to pass on aberrant traits decide to have their own children. Many people are outraged when a disabled or challenged adult produces a disabled or challenged child.
Newscaster and actress Bree Walker was born with ectrodactyly, or lobster-claw syndrome, which results in deformities of the hands and feet. She bore a child with the syndrome, and when she became pregnant again in 1990, she knew that her second child might also inherit the condition. She chose to keep the pregnancy and became the fodder of outrage. “It was shocking to me that anyone would make such negative public assumptions about an unborn child and his ability to cope with the world, regardless of the shape of his hands or feet,” Walker said later. She herself has had a successful career and marriage, is telegenic, and has many strengths to pass on. “Is it fair to pass along a genetically disfiguring disease to your child?” one talk-show host asked. “People judge you by your appearance. They judge you by the words that you use. God knows they’re going to judge you by the shape of your hands, and the shape of your body, and the shape of your face. They just do.” Implicit in many of these criticisms was that Walker had had no right to get pregnant, even that she was morally obligated to abort—no matter how much she wanted her child, or how competent she was to raise it. “I felt that my pregnancy had been terrorized,” Walker later said.
The talk shows reduced Walker’s children to their disability. As polio survivor and disability activist Bill Holt said, “For anyone to determine that Bree Walker should not have children because of one physical characteristic is to ignore all of the other wonderful things about the woman. Why not say she should have lots of children because she has one of the liveliest intellects and prettiest faces on television?” The media condemnation largely failed to acknowledge that veterans of a condition their children may inherit are uniquely qualified to understand the risks and rewards of life with that condition. Their choices are better-informed than our judgments of them.
Some people, however, conceive children as a means of validating their own lives. Joanna Karpasea-Jones, an English disability activist, chose to have five biological children. She did so in part as a means of asserting the social model of disability, saying that within her household, impairments were not disabilities. She and her husband, like most people, wanted biological offspring. “Nor did adoption seem a choice,” she wrote, “as then I would never be pregnant or give birth—a thought that was heartbreaking to me.” Karpasea-Jones has cerebral palsy caused by premature birth; it is not hereditary. Her partner, however, has hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy, which causes muscle wastage and severe bone deformations. Any biological child would have a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting that condition. “Nearly everyone in our family was disabled anyway: me, my partner, his brother and father, my aunt and uncle,” Karpasea-Jones wrote. “If the child was affected, she certainly wouldn’t feel the odd one out. Normality is subjective; to us, disability was normal.”
The verti
cal identities within her family doubtless guarantee a sense of belonging, as in a family of dwarfs or deaf people. But her lack of engagement with the likely reality of her children’s hurting bodies is distressing. In her extensive writings, she acknowledges that her condition and her partner’s have caused them considerable physical pain, which she seems to have been unambivalent about passing on. She subverts her children’s bodies to the social model of disability. I have met many proud people with special challenges and seen their happy families. I have also seen pervasive aching, not all of it owing to external circumstances. In fact, Karpasea-Jones’s decision was not well received by her own family. “My own mother told me we had been irresponsible to take such a risk and asked me to get an abortion,” she wrote. “My partner’s mother said that I wouldn’t be able to carry a baby to term. I felt pleased when I found myself 11 days overdue without so much as a twinge. That’ll show them, I thought.” Ego confusion between parents and children is pervasive in every demographic; it’s no mean feat to find the difference between helping your children formulate their dreams and trapping them in your own. Karpasea-Jones’s children are unlikely to be distressed that they exist, but may well be resentful if they conclude that she bore them in pursuit of an agenda. Yet self-absorbed parents everywhere exploit their children for reflected glory on the soccer field, in the chess club, at the piano. Narcissism is a myopia hardly limited to disability activists.
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