This documentary film moves beyond the boilerplate feel-good progressive boosterism by capturing the voices of the kids themselves. Who are these young people? What is their experience? Where are we really, in this moment in time? Where are we all in this journey? Why not spend some time with these young people, their friends and allies, and find out. Please consider donating to this Kickstarter Project, soon, as there  are only a few days left to reach the funding goal. A digital download of the film is included with a donation of 25.00, but any amount of money helps.

We must be swift as a coursing river
BE A MAN
With all the force of a great typhoon
BE A MAN
With all the strength of a raging fire
Mysterious as the dark side of the moon

–Mulan, 1998, Walt Disney Pictures

We’re re-watching the Disney canon with Oscar, at his insistence, and enjoying the movies again, one by one. Back in the day, when the kids were small, I had an early mp3 player packed with kid music, which helped pacify them as we drove to and from daycare. The “Be a man,” song from Mulan stands out as one of my favorites, and watching that segment again was fun.

Mulan is a young woman in imperial China posing as a man to save her father from military service she fears might kill him. She’s also searching for herself, as a young woman having trouble becoming a bride. The film plays with gender norms and expectations–being a man, in this context, means trying hard, being brave, being strong, fighting for one’s people, for a common good.

Mulan proves she’s a man, or as good as one, throughout the film. She’s also heterosexual, of course. This is Disney. This is the 90s.

The song is reprised at the film’s close by a group of warriors crossdressing as courtesans in order to infiltrate the emperors household–they’re men enough to dress as woman for the cause.

The messages are good, empowering, going as far as one could imagine going for a mass audience in that time and place. Even now, they work. Heterosexual people defying and thus enlarging gender norms are important. The 70s Free to Be You and Me’s William Wants a Doll song is another example.

But the reality is, most-but-not-all of this gender play does mean something and most often what it means is gayness.  So telling the stories without the gay… well. It is what it is.

We need new stories, new characters, new role models; the culture is moving so fast that the progressive messages of twenty years ago are completely inadequate for the world in which we now find ourselves. The first wave of stories have come and gone, and they’re always tragedies. Gwen Arujo, murdered for being who she was. Hillary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry.  Abused and bullied GLBTQ teens in half a dozen sitcoms and dramas, where they fight to be who they are in the face of prejudice. Good stuff, true stuff, but in a way, these stories reinforce the very stereotypes they claim to be liberating us from. One fears the reason the mainstream culture tolerates these stories is that they have the effect of reminding the non-conforming of the price they will pay for stepping outside the gender binary.

Bu the new stories, the second and third generation stories, are coming, where these characters aren’t victims, aren’t victimized. The stories that move past where we are now, to where we are going, and tell us different truths. To the world where Femme stops meaning weak. Where  femme dosn’t mean victim, where femme doesn’t mean slut, where femme doesn’t mean less than.

A world where femme is cool.  My son Oscar lives there now–and he seems to be doing just fine, waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

I am editing Accepting Dad into a book titled Girl Things. The book will feature revised (and copyedited, finally) content from the blog arranged so as to tell a chronological story, with several additional essays included. I will be pulling most of the blog content contained in Girl Things, with the exception of a sample essay or two, for a few reasons. A blog is a little like a traffic accident. People slow down to look out their windows at the wreckage. Some do so with compassion, the best of intentions, while others devour the scene with an unholy glee. As my son completes his first year of high-school, I want to discourage that kind of casual attention.

In a book, one can be reasonably sure that the person reading the last chapter has read the first. A blogpost recapitulates, to some degree, the entire blog. In a blog, you write for your old readers and for someone stumbling in at the end, simultaneously. In Girl Things, I wanted the freedom to speak about some issues within the community of supportive families that aren’t intended for the casual reader. Journalists have cherry picked comments in the past to create controversies between different therapeutic voices where there were none. Making this story a book is one way to avoid that. The context needed to understand the last chapter is there, in the book.

Girl Things also marks a watershed in my career, as I attempt to build a new life for myself as a freelance writer.  My kids are at that age, when they start to pull away, when friendships replace family at the center of life. They want space, privacy.  So the old posts come down. The photos, as cropped as they are, need to go, too; they won’t be part of the book. Maybe a future edition, if such a thing will be, with Oscar’s adult approval, somewhere down the road.

Many of my writing friends, after mediocre to awful experiences with the professional publishing world, are self-publishing their works as ebooks for the various digital platforms, or releasing the books as POD (print on demand), or both. I suspect I’ll be taking this route with Girl Things. To all my readers over the years, I want to say thank you for your support, thank you for reading, thank you for your comments. I really hope you buy Girl Things, or get it from the Kindle library, should I go the Kindle Direct route.

One thing people are discovering about their digital readers is that they can read anything they want, without the cover giving anything away. I do hope that my book ends up in the hands of dads (and moms, and siblings) that might be embarrassed by my book’s title, by any capsule description of the book. These are probably the people who need it most. I should know. I was one of them, once upon a time, an eye blink ago.

So long ago. Before I had Oscar. Before he changed my life forever. For the good.

The cover of my review copy of Dr. Diane Ehrensaft’s new book, Gender Born, Gender Made might have been made from one of my family’s snapshots. The presumably male-bodied toddler with the tutu worn over his pants peers quizzically into the camera’s eye, evoking a shiver of recognition. I know that kid. He could have been my son six or seven years ago.

As the father of what Dr. Ehrensaft’s refers to as a ‘gender creative’ child, a boy who liked, well, loved, girl things, my family spent a decade working through the issues discussed—without the aid of this, or any other, book. The existing literature on transgender people, books like True Selves, spoke only of adults, and only of adults who had been viciously suppressed as children. The end result—misery. While True Selves showed us how not to raise our kids; there were no books to tell us what we should be doing.

We had a two-color trifold pamphlet from the CNMC, the Children’s National Medical Center and its gender and sexuality education and advocacy program founded by Catherine Tuerk and Dr. Edgaurdo Mienville, who writes the introduction to Gender Born, Gender Made. The trifold, as well done as it was,  was a slim reed upon which to  base our support of our child’s gender nonconformity. As one of a few dozen families on the the CNMC list serve, we had to make do with our small community of supportive professionals, a handful of studies, and the hundreds of anecdotes shared among our group of like-minded parents.

As it turns out, Dr. Ehrensaft shared our experience of raising a gender-non-conforming kid without a roadmap. Her son was a pink boy. She writes of the benefit, or curse, of her psychoanalytic education in the books “Relearning Gender,” chapter. While many of us were learning what little was truly known about gender development, Ehrensaft was busy unlearning what she thought she knew based on the bizarre arm-chair ‘science’ of Sigmund Freud and his ilk.

Ehrensaft’s previous book, Spoiling Childhood, which admonished parents to stop being wimps and exercise more authority over their kids, would seem a far stretch from the ‘follow your children’s lead’ message of Gender Born, Gender Made. This books PR release included a Q&A in which Ehrensaft noted the difference between a kid who refused to make his bed, and a kid who insisted he was something other than his assigned birth gender. Point taken. One has to wonder queasily if some families might have generalized strategies from  her previous book into gender policing their non-conforming kid.

Ehrensaft notes that older studies of childhood gender development are tainted by antiquated psychoanalytic models and homophobic cultural bias. Newer research based on self-selected groups of supportive parents is fragmentary and inconclusive. But parents need to make decisions now, about the children they have now, and the fact that the science can’t keep pace with the culture doesn’t diminish that need one iota. Gender Born, Gender Made, speaks to this reality.

If you are the parent of a gender non-conforming child, you can skip the rest of the review. Just buy it. Buy one for your pediatrician, and one for your kid’s school teacher as well, while you’re at it. I’m going to keep talking, though, because I’ve never read a book before where I knew pretty much all the experts personally, and had consulted on many of the articles quoted.

So Instead of incontrovertible science, parents of gender creative children must be informed by the hundreds or thousands of anecdotes assembled by the experts. adds a second volume to this slim stack of books. Following Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper’s “The Transgender Child,” Ehrensaft’s book shares the supportive parenting model, but its title seems a better choice. While Brill’s book has an excellent chapter on gender non-conforming kids who do not go on to feel they are born in the wrong body, the “trangsgender child” title will probably ensure it is never read by many of the families who need it most. The title alone makes Ehrensaft’s book a valuable resource, one that may prove more accessible than Brill’s book, when trying to educate educators, caregivers, or relatives.

There isn’t a non-pathologizing language for talking about gender non-conformity, so Ehrensaft is compelled to create one. Eschewing the term ‘gender variant’ as too close to ‘gender deviant,’ she makes heavy use of the word ‘creative.’ Gender creative kids are gender non-conforming kids creating an identity out of a combination of nature, nurture, and culture Gender creative parents are the parents that let them be, while helping them to navigate the non-supportive landscape outside the family bubble; obstructive parents put obstacles on the path of the gender creative child’s development. The goal is to prevent the creation of a dominant ‘false gender self,’ to allow the child to create a true gender self.

There’s a brief discussion of hormone blocking and treatments, which might be useful to read on your way to the pediatric endocrinologist. My own son’s development tacked away from a transgender identity as puberty approached, as did Ehrensaft’s. Ehrensaft cites the proven safety record of Lupron, the puberty-blocking drug used to buy time for the pre-pubescent child, without mentioning the ‘gotcha’ which plague parents considering this path. While it is possible to go off of Lupron and resume a normative puberty in a child’s birth gender, to date no one ever has. This may simply mean, of course, that the screening process has been, to date, perfect. However, this does make Lupron’s reversibility almost a moot point.

Because this intervention, of course, lies at the core of the controversy surrounding these kids, the fact that has drafted them and their families into the culture wars. Ehrensaft describes how parents of gender-non-conforming children emerging as transgender are presented with a choice; allow normative puberty to forever mark our children in ways that are often irreversible (height, hair, adams apple, hands, feet, and face) erasing that child’s ability to pass as their affirmed gender, or, make irrevocable decisions on their behalf, sterilizing them in many cases, and exposing them to the various risks of hormonal therapies. (By and large, surgery is left for later with trans kids, letting most parents off the hook for that decision but even there, among the firmly committed, families find themselves pushing for controversial treatment.)

Ehrensaft explores this difficult reality, the fact that there are no easy answers, and that many parents of gender non-conforming kids will have to learn how to live with ambiguity for protracted periods of time. Not all gender non-conforming kids will go on to identify as transgender; in fact, if the past is any guide, most of them won’t. Erhard’s own experience of a gender non-conforming son who would one day go on to claim a gay male identity, informs this book as strongly as her experience working with kids who feel born in the wrong body. On the flip side of this coin, Ehrensaft also shares anecdotes where apparently gender normative children emerge suddenly as transgender at puberty.

In Gender Born, Gender made, Parents of younger gender non-conforming children are urged to accept their children as they are, keep them safe, while simultaneously permitting them the space to learn, grow, and change over time, though every parent hears the puberty clock ticking in the background, knowing at some point in the future they will have to make a choice, to act, or to let nature take its course, which will have life-long, irrevocable consequences.

She tells us that gender creative parents will have to be brave; they will have to struggle with their own feelings of ambivalence and confusion. She tells me things I already know, but which I’m glad to see in print, as she addresses the various audiences to whom this book is directed.

As to the nitty gritty of dealing with a gender creative child, Ehrensaft says it isn’t the role of the therapists to make these decisions for a family, but to facilitate the conversations which identify the necessary compromises. Should my male bodied child be allowed to wear a dress to first grade?Should we conceal our chid’s birth gender from his classmates? Each decision must be made in accordance to the families own logic and circumstances. No professional wants to advise a family to hide a child’s gender status, to create this huge secret, but in some places this deception may prove the lesser of two evils.

I find it odd that Ehrensaft devotes only a single paragraph to the notion of parental support groups, and provides no contact information for them; perhaps she knows that the parents who can be helped by such groups tend to seek them out, but I was disappointed that she did not come out more strongly for this form of support and community. In the absence of much hard science, in a world of anecdotes, is is the parents themselves who are the experts, and support groups contain a great deal of practical advice and information on dealing with school systems, bullying, and finding supportive professionals.

The book has good chapters on sibling issues, on caregiver issues, on confronting one’s own gender history. Of particular interest to me was the mention of what she calls ‘the flight to health’, in which parents (who may have been trans or homophobic) suddenly embrace a gender non-conforming child, and rush towards transition.

In this she shares the concern of some professionals with whom I have spoken, that a family may fast forward towards a transgender outcome for a non-conforming child out of a discomfort with the ambiguity of a gender creative child who may eventually end up identifying as gay, or straight, or gender queer.

Ehrensaft’s experience as a therapist working with gender creative children, and her own experience of a parent of a gender non-conforming child, makes this book unique. She’s a double expert, both parent and supportive professional, and while we wait for the research to trickle in, for the science to come-of-age, it is people like her to whom we should listen when it comes to understanding this exquisite mystery of male and female, mind and body, love and identity.

I’ve had the opportunity to read a draft of a recent study by Hill, D.B., Menvielle, E., Sica, K.M., &  Johnson, A. (2010), of children in different therapeutic environments published in The Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy shows that supportive / accepting parenting is associated with lower rates of mental illness. From the abstract:

When [CNMC group participant's children were] compared to children at other gender identity clinics in Canada and The Netherlands, parents rated their children’s gender variance as no less extreme, but their children were overall less pathological.

This is what I take from the study; I’m not a scientist and I can’t speak to the statistical analysis, I’m just looking at the text of the study itself:

1. Supportive parenting which acknowledges and accepts a child’s gender non-conformity is good for kids; even when this non-conformity leads to awkward social situations and various degrees of peer disapproval. Taking the good with the bad, supportive parenting is associated with better outcomes than suppressing these behaviors completely ‘for the child’s own good.’
2. Accepting and affirming a child’s impulses and deeply held feelings, while setting some boundaries on a child’s gender expression to lessen peer / community issues works well for many of the children in this sample.

This is a cross-sectional study (it doesn’t follow kids over time) and so it cannot speak to causation; but it is important to note that each group sees a full range of kids in terms of degree of gender variance (IE, exclusively mildly GV kids haven’t gravitated to the CNMC, explaining away these results.)

I think the chief value of this study is reassure parents who instinctively lean towards a supportive approach, that they aren’t hurting thier children. If it feels wrong to you, to disappoint your child at every birthday or holiday, to make your child suffer by forcing him or her into clothing she hates, you don’t have to do it.

Barbie won’t hurt your boy.

My family have stepped outside the CNMC  recommendations to a degree, allowing our child to essentially pass as female in public for the last five or six years. This isn’t recommended by some supportive therapists. He seemed able to take the heat, and he has been psychologically stable and generally happy. The fact that he never demanded universal use of female pronouns, and that he isn’t gender dysphoric led us to believe that he isn’t one those kids who needed a full social transition.

Which means perhaps we could have set some more boundaries and not have hurt him in any significant way.

I have no regrets. If Oscar blazed a trail for a few kids in our system who do need to socially transition, more the better.

Raising your kids is a game played for keeps. There are no do-overs. (As I remind myself every time I lose my cool in front of my kids. A child will forget ten thousand happy hours, and remember the ten times you lost it in front of them.) In a way, this is a game we can’t win. Some of our best intentions will be judged by future generations as absurd.

In the end, we can only hope that they forgive us for being human, and for doing the best we can, even when perhaps, that wasn’t enough. Or too much! Every generation tries to get it right. Every generation fails. But I sense that we get closer to the mark every time around.

The arc of history is long, but it bends towards  justice.

My family has done its tiny part, tugging at the present end of that arc.

And it may be naive, culturebound, Western, to think that there is such a thing as progress. But I can’t help but feel we have been a part of something special.

And that all progress is made one family at a time.

As supportive parents find each other through mailing lists on the internet (see the CNMC and Transkidsfamily) we share stories about our kids, and the problems they face— and the problems we face being thier parents. Over the years a profile builds up, qualities that many of these boys seem to share.

We are astonished to find the same patterns, the same specific behaviors, popping up over and over again. List members collect their own lists of anecodotes.

Some of us have attended gender conferences and listened to presentations by clinicians and pyschiatrists working with these children. I’ve been lucky enough to have spent time talking with Edgardo J. Menvielle, MD, Catherine Tuerk, Greg K. Lehne, Ph.D. and Kim Pearson, all of whom I consider experts on gender non-conforming children. (Kim is an activist and mom, not a caregiver, but she has helped so many families navigate these waters.)

There are very few experts in this area, and very little research.

Some of the kids on our lists are trans; some are tomgirls; some are in flux; some are supressing these qualities and trying to fit in. The following list is not intended to subsitute for any professional opinion on the matter. My list is focused on gender variant boys who frequently do not end up identifying as transgender, though transgender children may share many of these qualities.

I have been told, and forgive the flakiness of the term, that Trans kids and GV boys give off a subtlety different vibe. Professionals working with them often have opinions as to who is really transgender (bound for SRS or a lifetime presenting as female) and who isn’t. But parents—not professionals—are the deciders when it comes to how to raise their children. These  professional opinions may never even be voiced, as they work to create the most supportive environment possible, given a family’s, or a community’s…limitations.

It’s important to note here, that even modest accommodations made for these children often have a huge impact on their later mental health and self-esteem.

Without further ado, here’s my list:

• Barbies not Babies: tomgirls (i’ll use that term for GV children throughout this list) are more fascinated by dressing up barbies than nurturing babies.
• Hyper feminine: the most extreme manifestations of femininity are embraced; sparkles; high-heels; make-up; rainbows; glitter; fashion, hair, nails, Jewelry.
• The Princess: A fierce relationship with the barbie princess is almost universal.
• The Drama Queen: volatility; extremes of emotion; blinding despair, giddy elation. All kids are like this; tomgirls often moreso. Favorite quote from despairing tomgirl: “I wish the human race had never existed!”
• Character identification: Identifies exclusively with female characters, even when the story in question has almost no role for female characters. (My son was Bo Peep in Toy story.)
• Averse to Rough & Tumble Play / Team sports: Almost forgot about this one. Obviously, some gender normative kids are like this as well.
• Towel Hair: Many pretend to have long hair, using towels as props. It doesn’t matter if the child is, say, african american. They all want long flowing blonde hair.
• Pink: You can have any color you like, as long as it is pink. In my case, pink and white has given way to pink and black as my son hit age 10. Fortunately, Hello Kitty stuff comes in both flavors.
• Expresses desire to be a Girl: My son was sad he wasn’t born a girl when he was younger. He blamed his mother. Some  kids blame God. He cried himself to sleep when he was 3 or 4 a few times over it…that experience changed us.

Here are some anecdotes from our email lists; it’s possible the self-selected nature of our groups have yielded a certain kind of GV boy. Take these with a grain of salt.

• Sociability: This may only manifest in situations that allow it, but far from being guarded introverts, many Tomgirls are ‘popular’ in early years, engaging a wide variety of both male and female friends; in places where boys are more rigorously gendered, these friendships may be exclusively feminine.
• Unwillingness or inability to suppress / ‘fit in’: this might just be a sign of time and place, but many of these younger kids seem reluctant to hide, even when presenting has consequences.
• Creativity: All kids are creative. Tomgirls seem to be very creative; the content, the subject matter, of course, may be limited to hyper-feminine content.  My son drew, sculpted, and assembled from recycled materials, approximately 3-400 iconic female figures from the ages of 3-6.
• Unhappy with boy toys: Almost every parent of a tomgirl has a story of an unpleasant holiday moment, when the child unwraps some really butch toy, and bursts into tears—or rage. My child went on an ironically Hulk–like rampage when given a huge green rubber Incredible Hulk.

I welcome comments and additions to this list by Tomgirls, supportive families, professionals, and transgendered individuals. If I’m off-base on any of this, let me know.