Living with Your Gender Fluid Son

Last week, The New York Times Magazine ran a story called What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress? Very interesting stuff . . . and no doubt challenging for any parents who have a son who likes to wear dresses.

I know a young man in his 20s who is gender fluid - he wears make-up, fingernail polish, and feminine shirts, but usually pants or shorts. When he goes out, he'll wear a dress and a wig. I can't imagine him being any other way - this is who he is and he is comfortable with it.

As the author of the article points out in an interview below, this is the first generation of boys who have been given ANY freedom to dress how they desire. And even though more parents are open to allowing their sons to express their gender fluidity, many, many more are not.

Hopefully this will continue to change and there will be a day when we can all be free to express our gender however it feels comfortable to us, without fear or judgment.

Here is the beginning of this very interesting article, followed by an interview with the author, and hen a Dads Unplugged podcast about the article.

What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?

Above, a boy prepares for a fashion show at a camp for gender-variant children and their families. More Photos »

By RUTH PADAWER
Published: August 8, 2012
The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, “has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows).” They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents’ ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time. After consulting their pediatrician, a psychologist and parents of other gender-nonconforming children, they concluded that “the important thing was to teach him not to be ashamed of who he feels he is.” Thus, the purple-pink-and-yellow-striped dress he would be wearing that next morning. For good measure, their e-mail included a link to information on gender-variant children.

Multimedia

 

Slide Show

A Weekend at Camp for Gender-Variant Children

More in the Magazine »

When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself “a boy and a girl,” but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways. Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man. Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. On days he opts for only “boy” wear, he heads off with a little swagger. Of course, had Alex been a girl who sometimes dressed or played in boyish ways, no e-mail to parents would have been necessary; no one would raise an eyebrow at a girl who likes throwing a football or wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt.

There have always been people who defy gender norms. Late-19th-century medical literature described female “inverts” as appallingly straightforward, with a “dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework” and “an inclination and taste for the sciences”; male inverts were “entirely averse to outdoor games.” By the mid-20th century, doctors were trying “corrective therapy” to extinguish atypical gender behaviors. The goal was preventing children from becoming gay or transgender, a term for those who feel they were born in the wrong body.

Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls — to exist in what one psychologist called “that middle space” between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. These parents have drawn courage from a burgeoning Internet community of like-minded folk whose sons identify as boys but wear tiaras and tote unicorn backpacks. Even transgender people preserve the traditional binary gender division: born in one and belonging in the other. But the parents of boys in that middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits. 

“It might make your world more tidy to have two neat and separate gender possibilities,” one North Carolina mother wrote last year on her blog, “but when you squish out the space between, you do not accurately represent lived reality. More than that, you’re trying to ‘squish out’ my kid.” 

Read the whole article. So far, the article has generated 853 comments - and a follow-up interview with the author of the article. Here is a big chunk of that interview, which I think is helpful in understanding the article.

Behind the Cover Story: Ruth Padawer on Parenting Boys Who Dress Up As Girls

By RACHEL NOLAN

 

 
Tala Al Ramahi

Ruth Padawer, who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, wrote this week’s cover article on boys who like to dress up as girls. Her last article for the magazine was on reducing a pregnancy with twins to a single fetus.

___

What was your first impression when you went from reading about gender-variant kids in forums online and talking to their parents to meeting the kids themselves?

I learned a lot from these kids. Their conviction — that it was fine to be a boy and do things typically restricted to girls — felt very deep-seated and compelling. It forced me to examine my initial disorientation at seeing a boy in a glittery “girly” outfit while insisting he felt like a boy. These pink boys offer us an opportunity to think about what gender is, what purpose it serves and why it’s been a central way of identifying someone.

The children you quote in your article seemed to find their behavior totally natural, and it was the parents who had to adjust. But aren’t there kids who crumple under pressure from their parents to behave in a more “normal” way?

I didn’t talk to kids who yielded to their parents’ pressure to conform, though surely they’re out there; just look at Catherine Tuerk — whom I wrote about — whose son tried to fit the bill. The data suggests that whether or not their parents pressure them, most “pink boys” will become significantly more gender conforming by age 10. It’s hard to know whether that’s a natural development or if it’s because they’re yielding to social pressure. Researchers themselves are uncertain.

Even the parents who consider themselves very liberal were still uncomfortable when their boys reached for dresses. Was there any factor that seemed to lead parents to accept and even encourage gender-variant behavior?

I don’t think there was any one thing. For many, it was seeing how miserable their kids were when forced to conform — and seeing how peaceful their children were when allowed to be themselves. Of course, finding support from therapists and other parents helped a lot, not only with the big picture questions — do I suppress or support this? — but with smaller decisions too. Do I let my son wear a dress to Aunt Susie’s Thanksgiving dinner so he’ll be happy, or do I prohibit it so Grandpa will be happy? Whose needs should be given more importance? What compromises are possible?

Have therapists who counsel parents on this become more accepting of gender-variant children because of changes in society, or was it some kind of theoretical shift in the field of psychology?

Therapists live in the same world that parents do, and I suspect they’ve both been quite affected by the greater visibility and acceptance of gays and transgendered folks over the last few years. Also, as more clinicians published articles and essays questioning the industry’s status quo, more of their colleagues became aware of the debate in the field.

Have gay rights advocates become actively involved in this issue?

Gay rights groups have gotten increasingly involved in the fight to expand legal protections to other sexual or gender minorities. But the change on the ground level — the social acceptance part — seems somewhat more organic, as the culture has become increasingly aware of the diversity in our society.

Finally, the Dads Unplugged podcast also decided to discuss this article - and here is that post.

What If Your Boy Likes To Wear A Dress?

Posted on 15 August 2012

The first time you laid eyes on your son, what went through your mind? Have you imagined playing together? Have you imagined playing with dolls, dressing up and having tea parties? No Dad imagines that but many find that is what happens when their boys grow up wanting to be like a girls. In a recent NY Times article, this issue was discussed at length. Todd and Kent had their own chat about what to Di when your son wants to be like a girl.

Do you force your child to be something they’re not? Do you let them go to school in dresses and wear wigs? Much of this episode focuses on this, while there is also a larger discussion about how we as Dads can be even better.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Jon-Jon Goulian - My life as a man in a skirt

Salon excerpted and adapted this article from Jon-Jon Goulian's memoir The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, available from Random House, tomorrow, May 17.

I can't imagine the hell a teen boy would go through for wearing a skirt and make-up - especially as a straight man. Hell, I can't imagine how hard that would be as an adult. Most men do not consider him a man at all, guessing by this article - but if courage in the face of ridicule and the cojones to live one's life as it feels right to do have any role in manliness, this guy is as manly as anyone I know.

The self awareness he possesses about his gender identity and sexuality are pretty cool - but I'm not sure about the whole not working thing. Maybe it's some form of ascetic lifestyle that works for him, which is cool - very low carbon footprint, if nothing else. But if it's an unconscious fear of being himself in a world that does not accept him, that's another issue - but since he can't afford therapy, he may never know.

My life as a man in a skirt

I've worn women's clothing and cosmetics since the age of 16 -- but that doesn't mean what you might expect

By Jon-Jon Goulian

For the great bulk of my adult life, beginning roughly when I was sixteen, and continuing, off and on, until now, at the age of forty, I have fallen short, sometimes dangerously short, of the conventional ideal of masculinity. From my taste in clothing (skirts and high heels and women's underwear), to my taste in cosmetics (pink lip gloss and eyeliner), to my taste in sex (I can't get aroused unless I'm submissive, and it helps if the woman looks like a boy), to my distaste for body fat and body hair and competition of any kind, to the two hours it still takes me to get ready to go out at night, I have behaved, in many respects -- and I have gotten no end of shit for it -- like a vain, prissy, neurotic, body-obsessed "woman." Or, in the words of a powerful Italian mobster named Jackie the Toad, with whom I worked very closely for a year after college, I have behaved, revoltingly, like "half-a-fag."

By "half-a-fag," Jackie the Toad was not suggesting that I occasionally sleep with men. Of my heterosexuality he was fairly well convinced, since he believed, erroneously as it happens, that I was sleeping wholeheartedly with a "plump and yummy" Italian hairdresser we knew in common. (And as it happens, I do not sleep with men. On the few occasions in my adult life when I have been in the near company of another man's erect penis, my impulse was to flee.) What Jackie meant by "half-a-fag" was that, though I seemed to be attracted to women, and ostensibly occasionally slept with them, the way I held myself -- the way I walked, the way I ate, the way I dressed, the way I obsessively studied my reflection in the mirror, the way I gabbed away "like a little girl" on the phone with my friends, the way I did not salivate at the sight of every woman's bouncing tits -- was not in keeping with what one expects of a real man.

Jackie was not alone, among the important men in my early life, in thinking that my masculinity left something to be desired. My maternal grandfather, a rather prominent political philosopher named Sidney Hook, who wrote, in book after book and for every serious journal imaginable, on subjects ranging from Marxism to existentialism, and from psychoanalysis to euthanasia, and who spent most of his life, in the face of Communist aggression around the world, fighting, with his voice and his pen but never his fists, for the causes of freedom and democracy -- a man, therefore, who could not have been further removed, both culturally and intellectually, from Jackie the Toad -- also, in so many words, called me "half-a-fag."

The word he used was faygeleh, a mild Yiddish pejorative for homosexual. Queer and fairy are close approximations. When he used the word, in a conversation with my grandmother over breakfast at their summerhouse in Vermont, with me, visiting for a week during college, sitting daintily between them, he assumed I didn't know what it meant, forgetting that Leo Rosten's "The Joys of Yiddish," which I had thumbed through many times, was sitting in a bookcase just ten feet away. I ended up cutting my visit short. The straw that broke the faygeleh's back was my grandfather's more direct confrontation, a few days later, of the issue of my sexual orientation, in which he minced no words, in either Yiddish or English, in expressing his disgust for my appearance. My grandfather later apologized to me for his meanness and intolerance during this visit, his letter including the following -- "I hope you will one day forgive your Grandpa. It's not your fault, it's mine. I'm an antediluvian fuddy-duddy, an old stick-in-the-mud, and it's not always easy for me to keep up with the behavior of young people."

And then there was my dad. The poor man, to his hurt and disappointment, has never known quite what to make of me. And who can blame him? I've never looked like the children of his friends, or even like the children of strangers, and I certainly haven’t looked like the two children (my two older brothers) who preceded me. Nor have I acted like any of them. My behavior, in his eyes -- the eyes of a hematologist and biochemist for whom there is always either a rational or irrational course of action -- has been consistently irrational and bizarre. And I don't know of a single father who would disagree with him. Consider: I rarely have a job, generally living hand to mouth on mung beans and millet and canned herring; I've lived most of my life in a succession of cramped, skimpily furnished rooms on other people's terms, including a five-year stretch in a curtained-off portion of a woman's living-room; I don't own a suit or tie or even a single pair of respectable trousers; the heels of my shoes, bordering on stilts, run from four to seven inches; I own very few shirts that fall below my belly button; my tattoos, like that terrible ivy growing up the side of our house that my father was always hacking away at with a shears when I was a child, seem to climb another foot every time he turns his back, and now, at the base of my neck, are encroaching on my face; I move from coast to coast seemingly at whim, doing the same "nothing" in Los Angeles that I was doing just as easily in New York; my love life is baffling, my romantic entanglements lasting, on average, about forty-five minutes; I sometimes go for weeks, even months, not speaking to anyone, in a state of willful solitary confinement, and, far from unsettling me, this seems to bring me nothing but peace and fulfillment; despite having a law degree, and having clerked for a federal judge, which should have earned me a salary by now of at least $250,000 a year, my most recent bout of employment, for $12 an hour, was babysitting a seven-year-old girl named Ruth; I own nothing, and save nothing, and accomplish nothing tangible, and have no permanent hold on life whatsoever. If an alien spacecraft, mistaking me for a representative human being, zoomed down from the heavens and grabbed me for the zoo back home, my absence would be noticed by about ten people, and missed, at most, by five. Ruth would be one of them.

And, yes, I dress like a girl. How many dads out there do we know of who could put up with that? About my shiftlessness, my lack of drive, my father has continually expressed frustration, but about my androgyny, to his great credit, he's only directly pressed me once, when I was eighteen, about to head off to Columbia College (his alma mater), my androgyny having just come into full bloom. I was in the kitchen at the time, making a quesadilla with fat-free mozzarella. He snuck up behind me, taking me by surprise just as I was about to open the toaster oven:

"Jonathan? Can you please explain something to me? What is this ensemble all about? The sarong, the earrings, the lipstick, your mother's perfume. My curiosity has finally gotten the better of me, and I can’t help but try to satisfy it."

There's an especially obnoxious drawl that every Southern California teenager, when under attack, can adopt in half a second if he wants to tell his parents to "fuck off and leave me alone," and I put on that drawl and said: "I don't know, man. I wear what I wear."

"Don't call me 'man,' and just try to explain. I'm your dad. I think I have a right to know. I don’t think I’m asking too much."

He did have a right to know. He was not asking too much. His curiosity had a right to be satisfied. I will give him all of that. Unfortunately, I wasn't in a position to enlighten him, because I didn't know myself. I was just doing what came naturally to me. Being called to account for it, as I have been again and again throughout my life, was like being called to account for one's need to breathe.

It was not until the writing of my memoir, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt," a deep and painful stab at self-analysis (the only kind of analysis I can afford), that I was able to come up with a plausible answer to my father’s question. It is an answer, I hope, that will satisfy him, his curiosity if nothing else, and will explain to him why his youngest son, despite having been clearly shown the way to success and happiness, veered so drastically off the path.

Not long ago, my five-year-old nephew, Ariel, when he heard the title of my book, called me up and said, with a note of intense worry in his voice: "Uncle Jon-Jon, can I ask you a question?"

"Of course," I told him. "Anything."

"Do you, um, wear bras?" The poor kid was terrified. He lives in North Carolina. The craziest thing he’s ever seen is a guy with a long goatee, and tattoos, who works at the Whole Foods in Raleigh. Ethan heard the words Uncle Jon-Jon and man in skirt, and his wheels started spinning. He had visions of an angry mob outside his bedroom window, carrying pitchforks and torches, screaming for the head of the nephew of the man in New York City who wears bras.

No, Ariel. I don't wear bras. Unlike cross-dressers, those deviants, I have a sense of proportion. Five-inch wedges from Steve Madden -- I own ten pairs -- are respectable. My Tommy Girl tank top, falling just below my hairless nipples, is respectable. My gray flannel skirt, with a rhinestone belt buckle saying "Jon-Jon" attached to it, is respectable. Stockings, wigs, Pancake makeup, and whatever else cross-dressers do that I don't do -- keep it away from me.

Ariel's confusion was understandable. He was hardly alone -- anyone who has ever set eyes on me also comes to mind -- in wondering what goes on behind the scenes. One thing I've learned over the course of twenty-four years of behaving and dressing androgynously is that people hate to be confronted with indeterminacy. The uncategorizable is unsettling. If I were a man in drag, people would know exactly what I am, or at least they would believe they know exactly what I am, and have fewer problems with me: "Oh, yes yes yes, that man is definitely gay, and he has a very strong identification with women, he probably thinks he is a woman, and that's why he dresses like one, and a sex change is probably in the offing, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if his own special vagina is being made to order as we speak."

But that's not what I was, that's not what I am. I have a penis, and I am attached to it. My androgyny was, and is, more subtle and confusing, less womanly, say, than boyishly girly, or perhaps girlishly boyish better captures it, or perhaps epicene is the word we're looking for here, but epicene's not very helpful because what the hell does epicene really mean? And this difficulty in summing me up drives people crazy. They won't have it. Whether I like it or not, they'll find just the right label for me -- homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, polysexual, metrosexual, metasexual; autosexual, cryptosexual, crypticsexual, protosexual, extraterrasexual, gender-bender, glam-boy, player, poseur, flaneur, slut, aesthete, dandy, lebenskunstler; lotus-eater; bohemian nymph; bourgeois nymph; bourgeois nymph masquerading as a bohemian nymph! -- and, whether they like it or not, they’re determined to make it stick.

Jon-Jon Goulian grew up in La Jolla, Calif., where he wore a skirt to his high school prom. A grandson of political philosopher Sidney Hook, he attended Columbia College and NYU Law School. "The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt" is his first book.

Tags: Salon, excerpt, Jon-Jon Goulian, memoir, books, The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, transvestite, men, masculinities, transvestites, cross-dressing, conventional ideal of masculinity, half-a-fag, faygeleh, androgyny, indeterminacy, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, polysexual, metrosexual, metasexual, autosexual, cryptosexual, crypticsexual, protosexual, extraterrasexual, gender-bender, glam-boy, player, poseur, flaneur, slut, aesthete, dandy, lebenskunstler, lotus-eater, bohemian nymph, bourgeois nymph, bourgeois nymph masquerading as a bohemian nymph