I don't often publish long personal essays on this blog, unless something is really bugging me.
And something really is.
I have a Facebook friend (not someone I've ever met), a writer and teacher who is deeply involved in gender issues and dispelling stereotypes/stigma around sexual orientation. She counsels students who have been wounded by internet bullies, and her published poetry often touches on these hot-button issues.
But I do notice something in her posts cropping up more and more.
She describes both her kids as "queer", and is fiercely proud of this identification as an example of personal integrity in the face of an intolerant world. As far as I can make out, they are either pre-teens or in their early teenage years. I know that some parents have helped their pre-pubescent kids "transition" to the opposite gender because the kid identifies as such. I have mixed feelings about this, because I know about the wild emotional swings of late childhood/early adolescence and the highly volatile quest for an authentic identity, which, to be perfectly honest, I am still engaged in now.
I'm not saying "kids don't know what they want". I am saying "kids don't ALWAYS know what they want," and, even more importantly, "kids don't always know what they NEED" - or what is good for them, or even safe for them.
This fellow poet recently "outed" one of her kids (including photos) as "non-binary", a term I never heard until recently. It's one of the many buzzwords around gender that I admittedly find hard to keep up with (given that I came of age in the 1960s, before Stonewall even happened).
I have always believed gender is much more fluid than has ever been acknowledged or accepted in the past. But if a kid in their early teens identifies as both male and female, or neither male nor female, particularly if this revelation is recent, I think they need to be very careful how and where such sensitive information is displayed.
Even if that child gives their parents "permission" to have this information posted on social media, even if that child is "cool" with it or even wants it out there where everyone can see it - maybe because of the rush of initial exhilaration at making the discovery - does that make it a wise idea or even safe to actually do what they are asking?
There is no such thing as deletion on the internet. My son the professional techie calmly retrieved ALL of my files when my computer self-destructed a few years ago. I was in hysterics because I was sure it was all gone forever. He told me he retrieves deleted files for businesses all the time, and it's a piece of cake. People take screenshots of disastrous tweets every day, then replicate them millions of times, claiming "hey, they posted it first!"
Can a teenage kid in a highly vulnerable position really make wise decisions about publicly disclosing something so fraught with emotion? What should the parents' role be in all of this? Most problematic: what if the child takes a different direction in the future? The transgendered community is notoriously inflexible and unsupportive of people who DO take a different direction and decide to "detransition". Meantime, the record of their initial transformation is there on the internet: the photos, the videos, the posts - forever.
My four teenage grandkids are all in that violent pendulum-swing between insightful young adulthood (including serious conversations that just blow me away with their astute perceptions and mature observations) and faux-toddlerhood, going wild over shirts with pink llamas on them and the adventures of Peppa Pig, a primitive and extremely obnoxious British cartoon series designed for preschoolers.
So: Albert Schweitzer versus a one-dimensional, lame-looking family of pigs. Where does the truth lie? It should be completely OK for adolescent kids NOT to know where they stand. It may be perceived as healthy to come out, the kid may even ASK to come out, and on the surface of it, coming out on social media may seem like a wonderful way to counter stigma and publicly display an example of personal courage. I "get" this, and the immense pride which seems to be behind all of this woman's posts about the subject
But I very strongly believe that it can be a disastrous decision to let the child call the shots. When parents do not play watchdog, do not act as a filter, and do not safeguard their child from the consequences of too much exposure, they are falling down in the first duty of parenthood, which is to keep their children safe.
Due to the influence of that ravening monster, the internet, parental responsibilities are changing rapidly, and people have not yet had time to adjust to it. Those of us who did not grow up with social media often make disastrous blunders which are the result of not thinking things through, and - even worse - cannot ever be retracted. But in this situation, who if anyone is really thinking it through? This woman is a published author, something which takes her posts to a whole new level of public awareness, and has been very vocal about working with "many-gendered" people. She has shared the way her child came out to her joyously, with a great sense of celebration. She received many warm and supportive comments from her Facebook friends, backing her up unconditionally in everything she is doing. The one person who expressed concern about how kids sometimes "go back and forth" and should not be expected to be consistent received a hurt, defensive and even angry response.
But celebrations of difference need to be tempered with reality. Having personal gender issues displayed on the social media billboard is risking the child's emotional wellbeing, particularly at school where teachers and students are not likely to react with sensitivity. "Awareness" programs can only go so far, and haters are going to hate no matter what. My feeling is that this woman exists in a sort of bubble, preaching to the Facebook choir and thus living in the illusion that most people are OK with all this and that any potential harm to her child can be resolved.
My daughter-in-law has asked me, and sometimes reiterates, that I not post any photos or videos of her daughters on social media. My grandgirls are smart, beautiful, funny, interesting, and (by the way) brilliant dancers who are now winning trophies in competition hand-over-fist, so you can imagine how hard it is for me to stick to this. But I know EXACTLY why she is doing it. My own daughter is careful about her two kids, and does not have a "share" feature on her Facebook page which, in spite of her being a public figure in media, only has a small and select group of friends. The only pictures I can share appear rarely on their Dad's page, which is part of his internet presence as a prominent sportscaster. But these are posted selectively and with care. I find it all kind of frustrating because these kids are so magnificent and I love them so much, but I totally understand why all the ins and outs of their adolescence CANNOT be made public.
Lest you think I believe people should go back in time and hide all revelations about gender identity, it's not that way at all. What I'd say to MY kid is: wait. That part of your identity will still be there and still important to you when you are twenty and on your own. If not, then you have evolved in a different direction, and that's OK too. It's all OK - but it's not always OK, or even safe, to tell the whole world.
http://www.laweekly.com/2010-08-19/news/mike-penner-christine-daniels-a-tragic-love-story/
This is one of the better pieces I've read on the complex, thorny, politically- and socially-charged issue of gender identity, which is (as far as I am concerned) impossible to untangle from human identity. In this case, in spite of a valiant effort, it all went disastrously wrong. I believe the current prevailing attitude is to believe that if a person is unhappy with their birth gender, transitioning will help them be "who they really are", and as a result, much happier and more fulfilled. If a person's experience does not fit this preconceived idea, everyone gets very uncomfortable.
In this case, Christine Daniels gleefully embraced a lifestyle that seemed more like that of a drag queen playing a role, "going as" Christine rather than actually being her. But the internal conflict was brutal and never resolved, and she committed suicide before even reaching a truce. Myself, I often wonder why women's identity seems so bound up in hair extensions, makeup and stilettos, all the trappings that social pressure demands must be done as perfectly as possible. To "pass" (a rather shocking word used in this piece), you have to get everything right.
As for myself, and most of the women I know, we don't feel that pressure, at least not in midlife. It's not that we're slobs. The inside may well match the outside, however, if the inside isn't shallow and vain and obsessed with appearances. And here I talk of the popular culture at large, the whole Kardashian monstrosity of instant celebrity/rampant narcissism.
The piece is dated, in some ways surprisingly so, though it's only a few years old. It speaks of emails as magic portals, and whole newspaper blogs can be wiped clean from archives (and I can't help but think my son could go over there and retrieve them, just as he did mine). There is no social media. At all. I'm not convinced it would have helped. I did stumble across another provocative, taboo statement from a plastic surgeon who has stopped doing gender reassignment surgery because from what he has observed, people are no happier post-surgery than they were before. But again, that's something we just don't say.
In digging into all this, I found statements to the effect that only a microscopic proportion of transgendered people ever feel any regret about their decision, maybe 1/10 of 1%. Then another article says no statistics have ever been kept. How to set up such a study, then, when everyone is so uncomfortable even with the idea? I'm not saying "study transgender regret so people will stop having sex changes" - I'm not Archie Bunker. I'm saying that whenever I see fog or a dense curtain, I have an overwhelming desire to see what's behind it. Knowledge is the only way to clarity. There is just so much we don't yet know.
Other things float to the surface. There used to be a regulation that a candidate live as the opposite sex for two years before undergoing surgery. Then it was one year. Now it's down to six months. Hey, I'm not saying "don't transition," I'm just saying don't keep accelerating the whole process at the speed of light (typical of our "no waiting" mentality with its microscopic attention span) until it's down to nothing. My feeling is that it would be crucial for a candidate to have a substantial span of time to feel out what it's like, really like, the good, the bad and the indifferent, especially with regards to existing relationships.
I don't know about any of this because I haven't been through it. But I can talk about gender, see, because I seem to have one. I don't want to be male, though there are days when being female, particularly an older female, is kind of a drag (if you'll pardon the expression). Though I love being a grandma, and I like men's bodies if they're nice ones, and I really love the way men smell (especially good-smelling ones), making me "traditionally female" in some people's books, I refuse all molds and categories. Throughout my life, most of my close friends have been men (some of them even gay! Shrieks of horror!), I love looking at photos of women in Victorian gowns which might be seen as gay-ish (but I don't care, and even cherish it), and for the most part, I identify not as male or female, nor even androgynous, but human.
I do wonder however, whenever I delve into this subject, particularly with MTF transition, why there is such a tremendous emphasis on appearance. There are even schools where the transitioning can learn how to act like women, how to walk and talk and speak like a proper lady rather than a flower girl (so to speak). It's real finishing-school stuff, which fork to use, balancing a book on your head, etc. Amazes and dismays me that we focus on something so relatively shallow. I'd flunk that course for sure. If anyone tried to show me "how to act like a woman", I'd bite them. Where it hurts.
Post-script. When I first saw Cabaret in 1973, I had a thing for Joel Grey. An obsession. Not so much with him as with his character. He was simply gorgeous. He was sexy. He was manwoman, not really womanly or female, but still flouting masculinity, turning it on its ear. I was kind of ashamed of this at the time, until I went on the internet a million years later and read all these blog posts saying, "I want to fuck Joel Grey." Specifically, Joel Grey as the emcee, dolled up in lurid makeup. Grey is still around, though looking and sounding fragile, and has mostly been a Broadway baby, a stage actor and "triple threat". When I recently watched a clip of him dancing in the musical George M!, my face fell off. He was incredibly good, actually better than James Cagney. I also recall his turn in Dancer in the Dark with Bjork, leaping up on a table to tap-dance when he was 65 or something (oh, I must find that clip!). But the emcee character was all about androgyny that wasn't feminine. He was edgy and fierce, a bantam rooster (even crowing over a pile of mock-dead bodies in a mud-wrestling ring). I still get that feeling when I see him. Excuse me.
POST-BLOG-POST BLOG POST: (or something). Yes, I've furthermore found just tons of stuff on this, and it is alarming. I think it's an example of activism at its worst, starting off with a clear purpose and even good intentions, then snowballing into an alarming imperative of "we-think" (and there is nothing more deadly than "we-think", because "we" lose our individuality), eventually forcing conformity to new and equally soul-destroying norms.
In other words, if anybody in the "transgender community" bails, reverses, detransitions, or just desires to sort out their own human complexity in some new and less-entrenched way, they are not just ostracized but attacked. Meantime the "detransitioners" (awful terms, sorry) are beginning to point out that the medical establishment, the new, cool, socially-enlightened medical establishment (you know, the one that doesn't exist) has been a major force behind a lot of current thinking about gender reassignment and the "surgical cure". It's getting easier and faster all the time to get this shit done, which means there's not much time for changing your mind.
Am I the only one that gets queasy about all this? News stories are presented with soft-focus light and tender music, depicting Jesse, a 5-year-old boy who knows he's a girl because he plays with Barbies rather than trucks. (No kidding, it all comes down to that. If we are what we play with, then I guess I must be a pail of frogs.)
Then we hear that Jessica's parents (they're calling him Jessica now) plan to give him hormone-blockers to suppress male puberty, just so's he'll be more comfortable with himself as he slowly turns into a . . . girl?
It pushes us all, I think, into deep and spooky realms. Who are we? What's male, what's female, besides our anatomy which sometimes seems crucial (when having a baby, for example), and sometimes utterly irrelevant? Why is it so hard to get past, if it isn't that big a deal?
But maybe it IS that big a deal.
I haven't failed to notice, in the many stories I've recently read, that when a confused, pain-filled man rushes to embrace a new female identity, there's a rash of facial plastic surgery with the usual bizarre, puffy-lipped, ping-pong-cheeked results, followed by photo-shoots of the New Woman wrapped in tight leopardskin and sprawling on the floor with a provocative expression and fuck-me shoes. Her hair, the new hair, the extremely perfect salon hair styled to look casual, wafts gently back in an electric-fan breeze. This is somebody's idea of a woman, and my idea of a "what??"
Dismays me, is all. Dismays me that people who insist they are really women inside have to go through such a meat grinder to pass inspection. Please! These are cartoons.
(Just a kicker at the end. Under the heading "victories" on the sexchangeregret.com site is this strange message from "Robert John". It appears that lurking behind this supposed attempt to unmask an uncomfortable truth is an even more uncomfortable truth - fundamentalist Christianity. It's mentioned nowhere else on the site.)
I had irreversible gender reassignment surgery in 1997 absolutely convinced I was a woman
in a man's body. I anticipated living happily ever after, however I had persistent difficulties
and fell into deep depression. I began reading the Bible, unsatisfied with superficial
proclamations of diversity, inclusiveness, and tolerance. I happened upon King David's
famous repentance Psalm 51 and discovered, like David, I could be forgiven for all my sins.
I also learned God chastens those whom He loves and I was being guided to seek
repentance, and faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ. I knew identifying as a woman
was not living in truth, and returned to my given names and birth gender without further
surgery. My victory has come by allowing the Lord in my heart, becoming God-focused instead of self-centered, and am thankful for my birth sex and many blessings. despite the
consequences and challenges. God has led me to witness His truth and love, and I can
testify: indeed, God's grace, mercy and truth do set one free.
God bless,
Robert John
