My child waits until we’re in the car, heading home from daycare, stuck in traffic, before she announces ‘I want to be a boy’.
I pause. Clearly, I’m being tested. Parenting seems to be this ongoing game of being able to provide the right answer, in the right moment, while calculating, in your head, how much your child will resent you for your answer later in life.
‘You can be a boy, of course. But why don’t you want to be a girl?’
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On that early morning in October 2005, when one midwife caught her and another announced ‘it’s a girl’, my heart sunk. A girl. What do I know what to do with a girl?
Dresses and hairdos. I had been wearing a uniform of jeans and t-shirts for most of my life. I could count on one hand the times I’d worn a dress in the last several years and one of those was my wedding dress.
Bras and menstruation. My mother attached so much shame to menstruation; I could only store and dispose of my feminine hygiene products where my brother and father could not possibly see them.
Teaching her not to walk in parking garages alone. I had gone through my entire adult life without being assaulted, somehow beating the statistics. The same could not be said for my childhood, when the neighbourhood boys pinned me up against a playhouse wall so they could pull off my pants and see my underwear. I was the only girl, already declared a tomboy.
After her announcement that day, I turned to books. Books with girls and women, fiction and non-fiction. We read about kick-ass women like Amelia Earhart and Jane Goodall and collected titles like Girls Think of Everything and Rebel in a Dress. I tried desperately to correct what I’m sure I’ve modelled for her: that it’s terrible to be a girl, it’s scary to be a girl. ‘Fake it ‘til you make it’ becomes my motto. There are no parenting books for this. I’m making it up as I go along.
I try on different styles of parenting and my feminist self leans toward gender-neutral parenting. We shop from our neighbourhood thrift stores for clothing and toys and books and so she has no idea of stores that divide clothing and toys into ‘girls’ and ‘boys’. She’s just as likely to wear a twirly colorful dress as a pair of jeans with a t-shirt. She chooses toys based on interest and clothes based on feel. I know I’m successful when she considers all of her toys - dolls and trucks alike - to be girl toys because she - a girl - plays with them.
Each time she announces ‘I want to be a boy’, we read more books. She embraces Amelia Earhart as her hero. I begin to talk more about ‘options’. That, for now, she is a girl. But there are women who have become men, men who have become women.
Something changes. We are bathing suit shopping when she is seven and she is disgusted at the options. Her sensory issues are just being realized and she doesn’t want ‘clingy’ or to have skin exposed. What she wants are a pair of swim trunks and a swim shirt. This is fine by me; I am grossed out by the string bikinis available for tiny bodies. I joke that the more skin she has covered, the less sunblock I have to apply. She informs me that I must tell her swimming instructor that it’s not her who has signed up for swim classes, but her twin brother.
That summer is a big one. We go camping with a friend of a friend who is transgender. She listens to their child’s explaination of testosterone and she goes swimming topless because, I rationalize, this is the last summer she’ll be able to get away with it. She spends a week at summer camp in a cabin with girl campers and female counsellors and is generally separated from the company of boys and men, who are in their own cabins and involved in their own activities. She hates it.
There’s a tipping point. She is eight and after months of debate and arguing, she needs to have her hair cut. Short. She can’t stop staring at herself in a hand mirror. She’s asks me what boy names I like and decides to take on one of them. Pulling up to an art gallery far from home, I’m told ‘I’m Teague today’ and we practice out this name, this identity. He is Teague when he refuses to enter the female changeroom at the local swimming pool.
She is her, he is Teague. He wears this identify only sometimes. Not at school. Not when with her father, where she spends 50% of her time. I’m parenting one child with two identities. Again, a shortage of parenting books about this. I turn to my community to find resources and am pointed towards a local support group for both parents and kids. There are familiar faces there and Teague attends as well, but her father is reluctant. At the first meeting he makes his stance known ‘She is just being herself and there’s nothing special about it’. While Teague enjoys it, she refuses to return, wanting (I believe) to please her father, who has always been suspicious of my identity of ‘feminist’, of my desire to offer ‘gender neutral’ parenting for our child.
He is Teague that summer when we are vacationing and he refuses to enter female washrooms with me. He is Teague when he disappears into the male bathroom for the first time, non-plussed, while I wait anxiously outside.
That fall it is Teague that I sign up for a local scouting program. On the form, where I’m required to check boy or girl, I try to write in ‘gender nonconforming’ but Teague scratches it out. He circles boy and hands it in while I take aside a scout leader to explain The Situation.
There isn’t a notebook safe from her drawings. One day, she sits at a table and carves so hard with the pen, the paper nearly rips. The drawing isn’t significant, but the words are ‘Sometimes I feel like I am in the wrong shoes’.
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