Yes, I fully recognize it's been a while since I've posted. Yes, we are going to ignore this.
Anyway...
This post stems from a conversation I had with one of my friends, one of those friends you see about twice a month but when you do you have intense, soul-bearing, fulfilling conversations with them. And the conversation we had was about kids.
I was the kind of kid who for 17 years never wanted children. I didn't coo at little babies; I thought they were kind of ugly, actually, all wrinkly and pink. I couldn't imagine one in my stomach or drinking milk from my breast (actually, I still kind of shudder when I think about that). I didn't imagine myself caring for or nurturing them; I didn't imagine how they were going to be like me and how they were going to be like my partner (at the time, I was still thinking husband, although tellingly the man in the picture didn't really have a face). But when I turned eighteen, a biological switch flipped in my head, and suddenly I was imagining all these things (minus the birth and the breast milk). Suddenly I was cooing at little babies and peering in the windows of children's clothing stores and mentally assembling cute little outfits for the imaginary sprogs.
In the conversation, my friend confided that after years of a "Fuck relationships, I'm fine on my own, I'm going to have dogs and I won't need kids" attitude (which, I hasten to mention, is a perfectly viable one), she had begun to picture herself settling down and adopting a few children with someone. But here you have to add in our gay(ish)ness, and my genderqueerness, and suddenly raising children in this day and age is a whole new picture. To begin with, we can dispense with the pink and blue.
There's a couple in Canada who are overtly raising a genderless baby -or, that is, keeping his/her gender a secret to anyone but the immediate family. The child, named Storm, is pictured in "gender-neutral" colors like red, or with his/her brother, Jazz, who has pigtails. While part of me applauds this effort to denaturalize gender norms, the other part of me sticks her finger in the back of her throat at the theoretical language, and quivers to think of what's going to happen when little Storm is asked, on his/her first day of kindergarten, "So what are you?", meaning his/her sex. Who knows, Storm might have an answer then. But what if he/she doesn't? What if he/she still likes both his/her pink and his/her trucks? What if he/she says, "I'm just me"? Hopefully the interrogator will be growing up in a more freely gendered world and be able to accept that, but maybe Storm might get bullied for his/her cheek.
Beyond that, from my psychology class I've learned that it's a point of pride at a certain age for a little one to be able to stand up, puff out his/her chest, and say, "I'm a boy!" or "I'm a girl!" It's kind of like choosing teams- Red Sox or Yankees, Autobots or Decepticons, cats or dogs. The psych textbook made it seem very clear-cut: one day you look down and see what you've got between your legs, and a sudden sense of team pride is instilled into you. But as anyone who's been raised in a Red Sox household but has felt inexplicably drawn to the power and pride of the Yankees knows, it's not always that simple.
It certainly wasn't for me. When it came time for me to choose, I looked down, saw what was there, and then I looked up and looked around. Everybody was dividing along gendered lines; it was just something that absolutely everybody was doing, and I guessed I needed to do it too. But there was heartbreak involved there. The kids with the long hair were all playing with dolls or doing their hair; the kids with short hair were roughhousing and playing the kinds of games I'd always loved. But my hair was long. It was clear where I needed to go. So I slouched over to that corner of the playground, and thus began a decade-long struggle with the world and with myself over what I could and could not do. In the end, I decided it was my opinion that mattered; the world could go fuck itself, I was going to roughhouse and play my boy games and wear my shit-kickin' boots. I get the idea that this is a sensation that more people than just this butch has experienced.
But while it was a moment of intense personal empowerment for me, it came after that approximate decade of struggle, a soul-rending and immensely painful one. The world itself was telling me, day after day, that the way I felt and the things I wanted were just intrinsically wrong, and therefore I myself was fundamentally wrong. This is a struggle that I want to spare my progeny. If I had my druthers, enforced gender would be ended tomorrow, kids could come out as whatever they wanted to, and the tyranny of blue and pink (did you know that originally, when the Romans invented the blue/pink baby scheme, it was pink for a boy and blue for a girl? The people who re-established that practice, a soap-making company looking for a marketing scheme, fucked it up! Now tell me that's natural.) would be toppled. But this isn't going to happen.
Who knows, maybe my kids will be as truck-loving boys and doll-loving girls as ever lived (although no one in my household will ever be taught to value army men over tea sets). If they are, they will be valued and loved no more or less than gender non-conforming children; my sons will play soldier with me and I will drink endless cups of tea with my daughters. But if they're not, and if they come to me and are confused about why everything has to change and why they can't play the way they want to anymore, they will find a sympathetic ear. If my son wants to grow his hair long and wear lovely pink dresses, he will. If my daughter wants a crew cut and cargo pants, she'll get them. And I will protect them with all my power and my anger from any indignities the world and its inflexible gender scheme might try to inflict upon them.
But here's the thing that makes me the happiest, and the most proud: the conversation my friend and I had.
Things are already different, we said. The world is still hard for trans kids, for genderqueer kids, even for little straight tomboys and little boys who'd rather play with ant farms than soccer balls. But it's getting easier. There are already several "Mommy bloggers" who talk about defending their gender non-conforming kids from ignorant parents (not their children!). Things will already be easier for them. But the most important thing is that they will find only support and love, not ignorance and fear, from us. If they were to come to us and say, "Mommy, I think I'm a boy/girl/not really either of those things," we would say, All right. What would you like me to do? Would you like to talk to me, or someone professional, about it? Would you like some books on the subject? Do you want to go shopping for some new clothes? But most importantly of all, I want you to know that I don't care what you are, you are my child and I love you. Above all, I want to impress upon them the knowledge that masculinity and femininity are ways of feeling, states of being, are not monolithic in the least, and that you can be either one or neither or both, and that neither is better or worse than the other. I don't want my children to have to fight, like I did, to be who they are, but if they're going to have to I want to give them the tools and the love that they're going to need to do so.
I don't want my kids to start their lives as gender experiments; that's not fair to enter them into a struggle before they're old enough to understand what they're fighting for. Before they're old enough to notice or question such things, I'll refer to them as the pronoun of their birth sex. But I'll let them know that it's possible to change, to be something and someone different; I'll offer them the buffet of gender, the pronouns and the names and the clothing choices and the haircuts on one large, richly spread table, and let them choose from the available dishes what they want, or let them cook their own.
But goddammit, if my son's or daughter's skirt is too short, or his/her jeans hanging so low I can see his/her boxers, "Mister/missy, you are so not going out of the house like that. Upstairs now, and change before I count to ten, or you are grounded for the rest of your natural life. I mean it!" Just because I'm an accepting parent doesn't mean I'm not going to be a hardass.
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