If you were ever truly sad as a child, every child suicide tears at your heart, in a personal way. There but for the grace of God. Every story triggers a burst of anger, awakens a residue of tweenage or teenage despair. Child time, a time when the present was more present, and the future impossibly far away, the past only a few clear bright years fading into half-forgotten family snapshots.

Critics of the “It Gets Better,” campaign point out how little consolation the future is for a kid trapped in a horrible now.

“Don’t let them bring you down,” you think. “Don’t listen. Don’t believe what they say. Be true, to yourself. Know your worth, know your value, know that you are loved, no matter what. Don’t let those people into your heart, into your soul.”

You want to raise your kid like that. If you’re a certain kind of person, you probably want your kid to be strong, politically, too. You don’t want to raise canon fodder. You don’t want to raise a yes-man, an enabler. You don’t want to raise a kid who says at Nuremburg, that he was only following orders.

As I sit with my near-hysterical thirteen year old boy, wrestling with him, verbally, trying to control my own visceral, mounting rage, trying to get him to do his algebra homework, something inside laughs. Mission accomplished!

My son doesn’t care what other people think about him! He has his friends, his peeps, his interests, his passions. School isn’t one of them. He doesn’t care about grades. They’re meaningless made up numbers. He doesn’t care about numbers. They’re boring.

In our support groups, we hear from the parents whose kids are self-censoring, in hiding. They are trying to act gender normative, but the clothes don’t fit. They’re aping normalcy, living lives of quiet desperation, with the only flashes of joy or authenticity coming in unguarded moments of gender-non conformity; a moment with a hat, makeup, a dress, a book or comic or TV show.

This has not been our problem; at least, we don’t think it has been.

We have heard, read the work of, and consulted with the professionals who have noticed that a majority of gender-non conforming kids start to conform more and more around puberty, and emerge as gay at some point afterwards. And so, as we fell into this pattern, we were prepared, and we’ve watched it all, aware that any any moment, a crisis could propel us into the world of psychiatry and hormonal intervention.

The moment never came.

And now, in that part of my brain that continuously stares into the abyss, I acknowledge that my child may eventually seek to change  his body, and have a less positive outcome, because we have accepted him as he was, in broader culture where people are compelled to be male or female, and not a bit of both. We didn’t push, and so, he didn’t push back. Maybe in that struggle, the true self would have emerged more fully, demanded pronouns and blockers. Maybe.

But I have friends in the community, with kids now on hormone blockers, who know, that if history is any guide, that they are on a path towards full hormonal and surgical transition. Sure, the blockers can be removed at at any time, and a completely normative biological gender will develop, but to date, no one who has started blockers has ever done this. So these parents know, as I know, that they have passed an important milestone. And we wonder about the road not taken.

We’ve supported the child we had, the way he was, and took him at his word.

Acceptance has been easier, as it turns out, than non-acceptance. I say, to my son, you can be the person you were meant to be, and do your goddamned math homework like everyone else. And we can sit in anger and watch it not get done, together. Can he do it, though? Neuropysch consults and ADHD testing, a new normalcy to confront, another movement, neurodiversity, emerging to counter the medicalization and stigmatization of certain types of brains by other types of brains. The cold hard reality of the declining American economy, the necessity of higher-education in the Brave New World that is coming, where our kids may be able to marry as they will, but never find a job that pays a living wage.

And so, during our son’s evaluation, after the dismal homework output is sliced and diced, when we’re told of our son befriending the new kids, the lost kids, the kids in trouble, helping them, showing compassion above and beyond the ordinary, we both brush back tears, because really, we were never like that as kids. We only wish we had been.

For there is no good without a corresponding bad, no freedom without responsibility, no world where you aren’t arguing with your teenage child about something or another. So I think, we try to make sure we’re arguing about something that matters. And that the argument doesn’t get so heated, that love gets lost.

As time goes by, it becomes harder and harder for me to write about Oscar without violating his privacy. As he grows up, and struggles to create his own identity on-line, he defines himself, and no longer needs, or wants, me as an advocate, or greek chorus. I have to remember that my purposes in writing this blog have always been to a degree, selfish. I found that writing about this helped me understand myself, helped me grow, and added to my own self-esteem as the writing seemed to help others. I wrote for many years on gender exclusively for the members of my support group, the CNMC mailing list. I started this blog, with a thin veil of anonymity, in part because I felt like I didn’t want to flood the list with what was becoming something of a personal memoir.

Back then Oscar didn’t read much on-line, and neither did his friends.

After deleting a post which detailed the fascinating conversation between my son and a few of his friends in a car trip to the mall. (Kids open up with their friends in the car, somehow forgetting the parental presence at the wheel, as if we were robot chauffeurs.) I find myself wondering if it makes sense to keep writing these posts.

What is maddening to me is this paradox, that as we stand up for the rights of people not be defined by their pasts, or an accident of birth, kids like my kids erase their own histories, and the rhetorical playing field tilts. We’re left with the kids who identify only as the ‘transgender child,’ which acts as a kind of lightning rod for controversy and hardened hearts. If the popular understanding of the word ‘transgender’ wasn’t ‘sugical transexualism,’ this wouldn’t be the case, but at some point you have to admit a word means what most people think it means.

The media’s focus on the small percentage of gender-non-conforming kids who go on to surgeries and hormonal intervention may well be having the unintended consequence of even more extreme gender policing among the phobic. A generation of parents who have just barely wrapped their head around accepting the GLB are now left shaking in their boots staring at the T.

I’m torn between defending my son’s right to be the kid he was, with the reality of supporting the person he is now. Because, regardless of what he is now, and what he becomes, I think that those years were worth it, for all of us, my kid, my family, my community, the world.

No one should feel they have to live a lie. My kid hasn’t had to. No kid should.

But every kid has to navigate the realities of the moment. Many kids will choose to keep some things private. Many kids will emerge into the light only after decades of struggle, even if they have supportive families. Sometimes you have to hide, just to be. I’ve watched the agonies of other parents for years, those who had kids who self-censored, without really understanding that pain. I’m not sure I do even now, but I’m closer to understanding it. As I hear Oscar shrugging off wisecracks about his past from his friends.

So Oscar’s story, as told by Dad, may end here. I don’t know.

We are not our pasts. We define ourselves. Our parents are a just a greek chorus. Well-meaning, or otherwise.

The day I wondered if I’d ever hear anyone identify Oscar as female ever again, we went to a new vegetarian restaurant up the street from our condominium. They served breakfast all day, so there would be something the kids could stand to eat. The place was slick, sort of pseudo diner, with ten dollar veggie burgers made from mushroom and tofu.

“And can I get something to drink for the ladies?”

The waiter was looking at my son and his friend Rachel. My son’s hair was longer, and cleaner than usual, and he wore a bulky hoodie. The ladies ordered soda. The waiter bustled off.

“Hey Lady,” I said to my son. I’m amazed that this is still happening; my son is 13, and while a pretty boy, he really does look pretty much like a boy with long hair.

I think.

But then, what do I know? It’s just that I remember when my circuits, my gender-detector, the part of my brain that instantly sorts people into the binary, used to file my son away visually as female, while my more conscious thought held open all options for him. That part of my brain has since started filing him away as male, while the conscious part of me still holds open all options. (but in an ever-more- cool and distant way.)

So I was amused. “Ladies!” I said.  My son whipped a french-fry at my face, smiling, and gave me the finger. The french fry clipped my right ear, amazingly painful, if you’re not ready for it, the french fry to the face.

“Don’t throw french fries at me,” I said calmly. “Not cool.” I accepted the finger,  knowing that I’d had it coming. We don’t talk about these things directly, and we  never talk about them in front of other people.

I remembered that he’d explained to my wife that I wasn’t to talk about his previous femme presentation with his middle school guy friends. But somehow, with Rachel, with whom he’s played since birth, I’d felt free to try to talk about it. I should have known better.

I know his presentation was important to him. He fought for it, hard, for years, primarily with my wife, who bought the clothing. Repurposing halloween costumes into daily wear, bringing home skirts from the school clothing swaps, etc.

But this faded away as he shot up and hit puberty, and now, he’s a he. But he would never correct anyone who used a female pronoun. I never saw him flinch, or react, in any way to the use of any pronoun; it has seemed like a total non-issue to him.

But lately, I’d seen him shrug off a jibe about his presentation from one of his newer guy friends, and I realize that he has paid a price, both for what he was, and for what he now is, a price I can’t fully understand. He comes home from school, his hair in braids or pigtails, some girl whose name I’ve never heard had wanted to do his hair, and I think, he’s doing OK. He’s doing fine. He’s having a good childhood.

Another part of me knows that I can never really know, fully empathize, with his struggle. And as we leave childhood behind, and the inevitable secrets of adolesence accumulate, I worry about being blindsided.

But at 13, he still hugs me, wrestles me, confides in me now and then. He listens without appearing to listen. I embarrass him now, of course. I can remember, when he used to embarass me, but it was so long ago. That fleeting embarassment turned into a fierce pride, long ago.

And so when I see him denying his past, erasing it, some part of me rebels, and I want to tell him, never turn against yourself. Never let anyone take you down. You are better and stronger than anyone who slipped effortlessly from a normative mold.  You are a force of nature. You’re my child. You’ve been my son, you could have become my daughter, and someday, you still might, and honestly, I don’t care about that anymore, it’s not an issue.

Never hide. Never weaken. Never give up.

But we don’t talk about these things, out loud. I think he knows what I think. He might read this blog. We don’t talk about it.

I guess we don’t need to. He knows what I think. At least, I’m pretty sure he does.

“Check this out.”

My thirteen year old son has created a model of himself in the free 3d program MMD. The model is based on a teenaged japanese anime girl, which Oscar has given his signature, bright yellow, black-tipped eared, Pokeman hat, his shoulder length brown hair, and his blue blue eyes.

“Nice,” I say.

“I’ll have to figure out how to get rid of the breasts, but basically it’s done.”

Inside, the tiny voice says, “huh. his avatar doesn’t have breasts. Data point.” I smile at that voice, that part of myself, which still can’t help noticing, logging, commenting on, the degree to which my son’s behaviors conform to, and diverge from, gender norms.

The figure on screen dances, the camera zooms, pans, swirls, the techno dance music plays. The dance isn’t particularly provocative (thankfully) ; it’s intricate and hypnotic, and as the figure dances, Oscar copies the moves. As we walk down the street later, he periodically makes the hand movements. I copy him for a few moments until he looks at me in exasperation.

“It’s not cool when you do it, Dad. Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.”

Almost as tall as me, his voice changing, he’s growing up. As a boy, now. There was a time when I was certain that we would be intervening in this growth, on his behalf, using hormone blockers to delay puberty, and female hormones when the time was right for that.  And even though I’ve been wrong to date, there is no guarantee that we won’t find ourselves in that position someday. If we do, it will be after puberty has permanently marked his body as male.

Hormones won’t make a six foot two person any shorter; won’t narrow the shoulders; won’t shrink the hands or feet. The changes coursing through my son are natural, inevitable, and mostly, irreversible.  His growth as inevitable as the storyline the mainstream media creates for gender non-conforming kids. (Awkward Segue). The new ABC special on transgender kids has come, and gone, and I haven’t seen it yet, but it seems to fit into the pattern created by the media culture, which is both supportive, and exploitative, of gender atypical kids and the Controversy.

The Controversy! Should we intervene? How early is too early? Did God make a mistake? (Fundamentalists who have no problem accepting conjoined twins and intersex people, for some reason find a brain/body mismatch inconceivable.)  Important questions, but… Broken record time. I’ll repeat myself.

Focusing exclusively on the most extreme cases of gender dysphoria polarizes this issue in a way that I think does a disservice to the very people that the coverage claims to be supporting. If every boy in a dress or girl with a crew cut is seen as being on their way to a transexual outcome, then marginally informed people suddenly get the feeling that This Is Going Too Far! People beginning to grudgingly accept homosexuality as a normal outcome are suddenly acutely uncomfortable again. We must save the politically correct liberal moon bat intellectual’s children from the insidious agenda!

It’s just a Barbie for god’s sake, don’t cut the boy’s penis off! Try substituting a GI Joe with a fabulous wardrobe!

So, to say it again. Most (not all) gay people recall having gender atypical interests as kids, and were suppressed to some degree. There are ten to a hundred times more gay people than people who seek transexual surgeries. Most gender atypical kids norm themselves nearing puberty and emerge later on as gay. There’s no way to tell which kids will be gay and which will be trans, but to listen to them and to try to hold as many options open to them as possible for as long a period a time as possible.

As some parents ease up on the suppression, we’re seeing new childhoods. New normal childhoods. And though it is too early to say for us specifically, we can say definitely, as a group, we are beginning to see gay childhoods of a new type. Less unhappy, less closeted, less contentious, less stressful, less destructive. Honest childhoods for a population which has, until now, been forced to live a kind of lie. There’s no evidence that accepting a kid, allowing them to express gender atypical interest, alters their trajectories. In our support group, we have seen that letting the boy play in the tutu doesn’t make him trans; it doesn’t even always make him gay. The tutu doesn’t make the child.

The child simply is. And all we have to do is let them be. Easier said than done. But who ever said being a parent was going to be easy, eh?

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.

The New York times fashion section has done another piece on gender non-conforming children, currently titled Boys Will Be Boys? Not in These Families. The article gathers together the latest child gender controversies and adds good context and commentary. We have The Princess Boy, The J.Crew Toemaggedon 2011 flap, and links to a bunch of resources, including this blog. Most interesting to me is the fact that the story doesn’t emphasize the born in the wrong body story, which has been such a strong component of recent media coverage of gender non-conformity.

“Even when the child has extremely gender variant behavior at 4, it doesn’t necessarily mean the child will be gender variant at 10 or 15,” said Dr. Edgardo J. Menvielle, who directs the Gender and Sexuality Psychosocial Programs at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s possible they will remain who they are and they may also change in a variety of ways.”

In other words, parents have to wait, a limbo that many find unbearable. Some rush to aggressive advocacy. Diane Ehrensaft, a therapist in Oakland, Calif., said that a parent might say to her, “ ‘I know my child is transgender and I’m ready to go with hormone blockers.’ ”

Her response? “Whoa, not so fast.”

There was a time when gender atypical behavior was widely considered a sign of a child who would one day identify as gay. In a homophobic culture, this often had devastating consquences, as children were subjected to reparative therapies designed to straighten them out, as described in Anderson Cooper’s recent Sissyboy Experiment segments. Ironically, as the culture has become less homophobic, this gender nonconformity has become more associated with a trangender outcome, with unintended consequences. Professionals like Kenneth Zucker, who no longer openly support reparative therapies for adult homosexuals now use the same kind of treatments to avert the transgender outcome in gender non-conforming kids.

As an advocate for gender non-conforming children struggling to communicate a nuanced understanding of this issue, media coverage has been both welcome and upsetting. A few sentences devoted to the most common outcomes, followed by thousands of words devoted to the most sensational, telegenic cases. This article represents a milestone in the coverage of this issue by the mainstream media, and I commend Jan Hoffman for having written it.

Sarah Hoffman’s omission from the list of parental sites and resources is my only complaint with the piece. Very strange, considering the fact that she consulted with Jan on the article.

My wife and Oscar stand above the sofa covered in stacks of freshly folded laundry. We don’t have room for everything, the kids keep getting taller…must be feeding them too much…time for another Good Will purge.

My wife holds up a short pink skirt; it had first made its appearance as a costume on Halloween Night when my son was in Kindergarten. The matching paper mache head went into storage, and the skirt became everyday wear sometime the next year.

“Go,” my Oscar says.

Pants with the knees torn out that no longer fit. Too-small t-shirts. As each of the handful of skirts that so defined him, and us, is held up, I catch myself holding my breath. I’m at the computer, pretending to read the NYT, not looking, taking it in, awash in a stew of difficult to describe emotion.

“Go,” Oscar says.

“I don’t know?” My wife says.

“Go,” Oscar says.

She holds up the final skirt, a sort of bluish plaid kinda thing. Damn, it’s almost a kilt.

“Keep.”

I exhale.

A few days later I find a home movie, of my son and his oldest friend.  ”Everybody, come check this out!” The family gathers.

The title reads, The Two Princesses, made with our elderly DV camcorder, starring two little girl-looking creatures abducted by a pudgy monster in a felt hat sprouting six green eyestalks. My even younger son pokes the creature savagely with a plastic sword. It howls in monstrous rage. As the attacks progress and become more vicious, in a more normal voice, it stage whispers—

“Seriously, Leo, that hurts. Stop it. Stop it now.” The kind of thing you don’t edit out of a home movie. The princesses begin to dance and twirl—

“Turn it off!” Oscar shrieks. “Turn it off!” He’s smiling, laughing, cringing at the sight of himself in his Target bought Disney Princess Dress, with the pants underneath.

They told us this might happen, the folks at the CNMC. In fact, this is the most common outcome, for boys who like girl things, as they hit the middle school zone, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. They norm themselves, to varying degrees. So I can’t say I didn’t see it coming.

But I didn’t see it coming.

A week later, at Target, a pinched, beady eyed kid would hand my son a box of condoms and call him a faggot. My boy still has long hair. He still is  who he is. I wasn’t there, which I guess is good, as I haven’t rehearsed what to do when this happens. My first reactions remind me of the people chanting and cheering “USA” at the death of Osama. Understandable, but maybe, not us at our best.

So the fight goes on. But yesterday, at my son’s science fair, as I watched him smiling and laughing with ‘his peeps,’ his word for his school friends, the kids he doesn’t have play dates with but loves, and with his actual friends, kids I know from a hundred after school visits, I realize that my son, the boy who wore the skirt, is having more fun in seventh grade than I had. A lot more fun.

A fact I ponder with gratitude, awe, and a twinge of shameful envy.

The duck test is a funny term for a form of inductive reasoning. It goes, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

Except of course, when it isn’t.

Which brings us to a sentence taken from the recent article Management of the Transgender Adolescent by Johanna Olson, MD, Catherine Forbes, PhD, and Marvin Belzer, MD. I read this out of intellectual curiosity, remembering a time when my interest would have been far from intellectual.

One sentence smacked me in the face like a fifty pound bass.

“In using affirming treatment strategies, mental health therapists and physicians do not define adolescents as transgender, but rather affirm their sense of self, allow for exploration of gender and self-definition, and give the message that it is entirely acceptable to be whoever you turn out to be.”

That sentence looks reasonable at first glance, but within it, is an apparent contradiction which strikes to the heart of the issue for parents of gender variant kids; the professional allows self-definition—WITHOUT defining the adolescent as transgender….

Huh! So you let them define themselves, but you don’t define them as transgender….So you are allowing exploration, but not granting them the full unchanging identity…until you have to, until you do…when it’s right…

As parents we think we are the ones who know our children best—but for most of us, this experience is new; we generally have the one transgender child. So our experience is limited to the one child. The best professionals bring with them the experience of other gender non-conforming children. So, you may know your child best, but a good therapist, who has had a lot of patients like your kid, knows things you don’t.

So we try to merge our deep knowledge of our kids, with the professionals experience of many kids, and get to The Answer.

Nine years ago, I knew my kid was transgender; I couldn’t imagine a more girly boy than my boy; he was obsessed with it; the dresses, the icons of femininity, the characters; the ballerina, the princess, the tutu, the sparkle, the pink, the purple, the high heels, the make-up…relentless…never ending…

…but.

After hearing Dr. Edgardo Menvielle’s profile of these kids at a gender conference, these ‘hyper-feminine’ boys who generally don’t go on to identify as female later on, another phrase had hit me, hard, and stuck.

Barbies not babies.

My kid didn’t really…nurture anything. He dragged a baby doll around as a kind of totem, but it was more like Linus’s blanket than what I imagined a girls baby doll would be like; its clothes long lost, and never replaced. He never fed, it, talked to it, rocked it, cuddled it, slept with it.

I agonized before telling my son about transition, afraid to find out, to start some sort of avalanche. He was in first grade, and we saw a person presenting as female who was pretty obviously doing the real life test and I thought, “well, seems like he has a right to know.”

So I told him about it. And he didn’t care. At all. He was in first grade. It was impossibly far in the future. Well, I thought. This doesn’t mean anything really.

But he never asked again, was never interested when we presented the role models; Wendy Carlos, Ru Paul, etc.

I may have known my kid better than anyone else, but I didn’t really know about what my kid’s behaviors meant. My kid passed the duck test. But he wasn’t a duck.

At 12, my son’s voice is changing, his face is masculinizing, he does drag characters for fun on facebook, he has a girl’s hair cut, but people are all now pretty much using male pronouns now; for a few years he was ok with any pronoun you wanted to use on him, as long as you weren’t insulting about it.

Never body dysphoric; never self mutilating; never self hating in that way.

When he was three he cried himself to sleep, after asking his mother why she hadn’t made him a girl. And I knew then he was transgender. But he never said he was a girl. He’s happy now. Happier than I was at that age, anyway. He has tons of friends. Failing seventh grade, but you can’t have everything. We’re past the early transition window and I see no signs we’re going there.

It could all change tomorrow. We’ll do what we should, we’ll do what is right; we were willing to do early transition if it was necessary.

But it wasn’t.

As a father many years ago, I missed a son I thought I had. There are odd moments now when I miss the daughter! I never lost her, or him, though. He was always my kid, always there, defying my every expectation. Being who he had to be.

We just had to let him.

I’ve stopped being afraid for my son.

Oscar’s twelve. The skirts have been traded for euro-metrosexual attire complimented by t-shirts which proclaim his love of retro video gaming. His perpetually unbrushed hair is now cut to shoulder length; a girl’s cut, which he mysteriously butchers by creating bangs with child’s scissors.

The whisper of a downy blonde mustache heralds the approach of puberty; his face is longer, nose larger, he’s no longer pretty. He’s more…striking…yet he still passes for a girl. My beautiful daughter, salespeople say. I’ve stopped even blinking at that. It doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve stopped worrying about him at school. Our progressive public k-8 has always felt safe to me, and as Oscar has grown to be as tall as any kid in the school, my comfort has only increased.

Our Liberal Republic is no paradise of course; there’s homophobia, trans-phobia, it’s out there—but it is, I think, a minority opinion. And that makes all the difference in the world.

My younger son’s friend recently opined loudly that pink was not an acceptable favorite color for boys. I asked him if he knew what my favorite color was. He said no, he didn’t. What was my favorite color?

“Not being an asshole,” I said. I went on to say people liked what they liked.

I could tell the kid didn’t get it. I didn’t care, and neither did Oscar. He’s internalized something about himself over the years. Oscar doesn’t cringe. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t fade into the woodwork.

Oscar’s identity feels bulletproof. At twelve he admits to no romantic feelings or impulses. Nothing would surprise me at this point; he has friends who are boys and girls and at some point I’m sure some of these friends will become something more than friends.

I’m not worried about it. The risks of being a tween, a teen, in an urban area, of being an American in a time of national decline, are real. But these risks are shared by so many. I don’t feel like my son is being singled out.

Our struggles now are with academic performance. I don’t worry about Oscar’s social life, except perhaps, for how to reign it in enough to get some work done.

My kid is happy. He knows who he is. And so do I.

Now, if we can just figure out how to pass seventh grade.

I’ve been in contact with producers from ABC and NOVA who had read my Slate piece, saying that they were interested in talking to me about accepting families of gender non-conforming kids. ABC is apparently thinking about revisiting the Barbara Walter’s Trans kids story they did.

I launched into The Story of Oscar, and my own bit about The Excluded Middle; the stories of dramatically gender non-conforming kids who do not socially transition or have hormonal intervention. The story of living with ambiguity.

Having consulted with Patricia Brown on her groundbreaking New York Times article, and Hannah Rosin on her piece for the Altantic, I have experience with trying to convey the story of ambiguity. In general, our story doesn’t make the final cut in any substantial way.

By protecting younger and less dysphoric children from media scrutiny, parents of gender non-conforming kids have allowed the conversation to be dominated by those for whom acceptance is a matter of life and death; those born in the wrong body who need immediate social transition and hormonal intervention.

While strongly supporting the rights of these children to the care and acceptance they need, I’m trying to work towards a more nuanced media presentation of the gender spectrum in kids. I’d like to see my own family, and countless others, reflected in this coverage.

I feel that this greater visibility of born-in-the-wrong body can feed into a paradoxical reinforcement of the gender binary, and a new layer of well meaning confusion. I also think this focus triggers conservative back-lash, as all accepting families are portrayed as hell bent on surgically altering kids with the slightest interest in cross gender play.

I’ll keep people here posted on any future developments.