Читать книгу Trans-Affirmative Parenting - Elizabeth Rahilly - Страница 6

This is a historical moment, it really is, and I don’t know how it’s going to come out, but it is a very historical process. You know I’m seventy-two … I lived through the women’s movement.… When we talked about gender in those days, we were talking about the differences between men and women … it was all social, I was around for that … and then you’re here with this, which takes on another whole aspect of gender.

—Leigh, founder of support group for parents of gender-nonconforming children

It is a quiet, early morning in January 2015, and I pull into the empty parking lot of a high school, which is still on holiday break. A few minutes later, Jayne and Glenn arrive too, a white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual-identified married couple in their thirties.¹ After months of e-mailing back and forth, and with a babysitter on duty back at their house, they were finally able to break away from the daily demands of work and family and meet with me. This will be my last formal interview with parents, marking a capstone to a project that started six years prior, with many other families much farther away. Jayne and Glenn have three young children, two of whom will be the focus of our conversation today: Jared, the eldest, a nine-year-old transgender boy, and Amy, the middle child, a six-year-old transgender girl. After exiting our cars and exchanging a few nervous pleasantries, we make our way into the school’s library. It is quiet, vacant, and calm, and a perfect place to hear about their parenting journey.

Over the course of our interview, Jayne and Glenn tell me about their vastly different experiences raising Jared and Amy. Jared is on the autism spectrum, and while he is the eldest, they did not recognize or identify him as gender-nonconforming until years after they began observing Amy’s nonconformity, as early as eighteen months of age. As they articulated throughout our conservation, hers seemed so much more noticeable. Indeed, Amy’s name appears roughly twice as many times as Jared’s in our transcript. Jared, assigned female at birth, was their “smart little scientist girl” and all about “dinosaurs and autopsy movies.”² In contrast, Amy, assigned male at birth, was all about the feminine: “It was not just the pinks and purples, it was the sparkliest, the glitteriest, the most diamonds and fake jewels on clothes or bracelets [she could find],” Jayne said. As of age three, Amy was happily making use of the toys, dresses, nightgowns, and accessories that Jared had discarded, including a princess costume box their grandmother had given to Jared. Amy also started issuing memorable comments about her sense of self and her body: “I’m a girl,” “I’m a girl with a penis,” and “God made a mistake.”

Like many of the parents I interviewed, Jayne and Glenn were at first tickled by the openness of interests their children were displaying. As Jayne said, “In the beginning, I think we were pretty open-minded about it, like, This is great, both kids are exploring.… Amy’s going to be nurturing and play with dolls.… Jared likes trucks and construction, how cool is that? We’re so open-minded, good for us!”³ But over time, they both “started to worry” about Amy’s behaviors, especially as extended family members seemed to disapprove. As Glenn said, “I started noticing … my boy isn’t boyish enough … Jared was never on my radar like that.” Per the reactions of Jayne’s mother, for example, they eventually gave the princess box away, over which Amy cried and was extremely distraught. Like many of my interview moments with parents, this one was emotional, both for the storytellers and for me as the listener. I sympathized with the guilt that Jayne and Glenn felt about these kinds of restrictions, which seemed so foolish in hindsight.

During these early years, Jayne attempted strategic, and exhausting, gendered compromises with Amy—“gender hedging,” as I have observed it among other parents.⁴ This included, for example, finding clothes that could pass for “boys’ ” attire but had some feminine “flair” on them, such as “a black sweatshirt with a little pink on it.” As Glenn said, Amy was living in a “hybrid” gendered mode. In the meantime, Jayne and Glenn were consumed with Jared’s behavioral health issues: “We’re like in major Asperger’s diagnosis land with her,⁵ so we weren’t thinking about gender … we were just trying to figure out how the heck to get this kid to function without tantruming in a public school. It was all about OT [occupational therapy], PT [physical therapy], therapeutic horseback riding, all those autistic accommodations and interventions.” They chalked Jared’s preference for not-so-feminine “comfortable” clothes up to his related sensory sensitivities, too, including plain leggings and tees. In fact, managing Jared’s behavioral issues eventually motivated Jayne to let Amy wear dresses to school; it was one less hurdle in the morning routine.

At four years of age, Amy was experiencing bullying and questioning by her peers at school. While Jayne and Glenn did not think at all in terms of sexuality or sexual orientation, others in their midst did, including a close older family friend, a therapist, who thought Amy might be gay when she grows up. Eventually, their pediatrician referred them to a specialist at a gender clinic several hours away. At the start of the visit, the specialist asked Amy for her preferred pronouns (“she”) and, over the course of several hours, gently attuned Jayne and Glenn to the prospects of transgender and gender-nonconforming children. Shortly after this visit, and with the doctor’s guidance, Jayne and Glenn experimented with letting Amy dress and express as a girl “full-time” over the weekend. While Glenn was resistant to the idea that this was anything other than a “phase” that they could steer Amy out of, he decided to go “all in” to prove everyone wrong. But this “experiment” only clarified Amy’s earnest self-expressions as a girl. As the doctor told them, “You’re kind of along for the ride right now, and letting your child lead.” In contrast to the “authoritarian style” of her upbringing, Jayne described this as a real “parenting paradigm shift”: “I always thought that I could shape [them], whether it’s their gender or their autism (laughs) … and here I have these two kids that exploded that notion for me.” Over time, embracing Amy as a girl just felt right, much more than resisting or hedging around her self-expressions.

Jayne admitted that she felt relieved to start using female pronouns with a feminine-presenting child; the pronoun “he” was starting to feel increasingly awkward and tense out in public. Jayne also confessed that she preferred the term “gender-nonconforming” to “transgender” because it sounded less permanent or real to her—like there was room for change—and because it sounded more like a “medical diagnosis” that she could use with others. For Jayne, as for many parents, referring to a biomedical diagnosis or “condition” helped to assuage a sense of undue judgment from others, in terms of her potential influence on her child’s gender. On these terms, Amy was born with this; her parents and her home life did not cause or “create” her gender nonconformity. While they came to reject the notion that gender nonconformity is any kind of “birth defect”—more a birth “difference”—Jayne and Glenn do recall using this as an explanatory framework with family and friends. Ultimately, they enrolled Amy in a new school so that she could start fresh as a girl, with only necessary staff knowing about her identity. As of our interview, Jayne and Glenn had fully embraced the term “transgender,” too.

While Amy preferred to be private about being transgender, Jared felt much more open about his gender nonconformity among peers, which grew more pronounced following the medical management of his Asperger’s. When we first started e-mailing, months prior to the interview, Jayne and Glenn had been identifying Jared as gender-fluid or gender-neutral—“somewhere in the middle”—and not as transgender. During this time, Jared was switching readily between male and female identifications and expressions, sometimes multiple times per day, with related wardrobe, name, and pronoun changes. As Jayne described it, Jared was “gender wild.” Admittedly, Jared’s fluidity felt taxing to both school staff and parents, who struggled to keep up, but Jayne and Glenn were grateful for the new school director, who was fully committed to gender inclusion. Jayne and Glenn joked, too, that Jared’s fluidity didn’t really faze them, since in earlier years Jared had insisted on being a “donkey” or “dog” as well. Jared’s case was always more of a “mess” and “chaotic” for them, Jayne explained, and it was hard to tease apart what was a matter of his gender and what was a matter of his neurodivergence—perhaps they were related. She joked affectionately, “I’ve learned to accept the mess.” Only recently had Jared started identifying full-time as a boy, and as of our interview, Jayne and Glenn were still trying to get used it. Their transition with Jared was not any easier for them because they already had one transgender child, they advised, but perhaps just faster.

Throughout our interview, I learned how intensely involved Jayne was, in particular, in raising their three children full-time and in managing all aspects of their childhoods, including the gender nonconformity and the autism. As Glenn said, “In all of this, Jayne has been the pioneer, the front-runner, and I sort of grudgingly follow, kicking and screaming behind her.” Jayne also took on an advocacy role in the school community, hosting workshops and trainings for staff and students about both transgender identity and autism. In addition, Jayne and Glenn started a support group in the area for other families with trans kids—a more local alternative to another one several hours away. As part of this, they helped to create a masterful online database of trans-aware resources and professionals for local parents like them. In short, their active parental advocacy labor, with clinicians, schools, and other parents and families, was apparent throughout their experiences. Months after our interview, I happened to run into Jayne at a conference on trans identity and community. Excitedly, she told me that since launching their support group’s web page, their e-mail had been “blowing up” with interested parents.