And I worried that if I was having a hard time wrapping my mind around my kid, and I love him more than life itself, then how would the rest of the world react to him?” As a parent, it’s really destabilizing when that’s pulled out from under you. “It’s hard to put a finger on why gender identity makes such a difference to our sense of who a person is, but it does. “The whole thing was vertiginous,” she said. She felt tortured by statistics that indicated gay and transgender teenagers, either of which she figured Alex might become, were much more likely to take drugs and commit suicide. She feared Alex’s fascination with femininity would make him a target of bullying, even in the progressive New England town where they live. How could my own child’s play - something ordinarily so joyous to watch - stir up such discomfort? And why does it bother me that he wants to wear a dress?ĭespite the confident tone of the letter Alex’s parents wrote to the preschool parents, Susan was terrified. But when their sons upend conventional norms, even they feel disoriented. Many of the parents who allow their children to occupy that “middle space” were socially liberal even before they had a pink boy, quick to defend gay rights and women’s equality and to question the confines of traditional masculinity and femininity. The fact that there is still substantial disagreement among prominent psychological professionals about whether to squelch unconventional behavior or support it makes those decisions even more wrenching. But parents of so-called pink boys feel another layer of anxiety: given how central gender is to identity, they fear the wrong parenting decision could devastate their child’s social or emotional well-being. That tension between yielding to conformity or encouraging self-expression is felt by parents of any child who differs from the norm. Some have switched schools, changed churches and even moved to try to shield their children. As much as these parents want to nurture and defend what makes their children unique and happy, they also fear it will expose their sons to rejection. The impassioned author of that blog, Pink Is for Boys, is careful to conceal her son’s identity, as were the other parents interviewed for this article. More than that, you’re trying to ‘squish out’ my kid.” “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. The goal was preventing children from becoming gay or transgender, a term for those who feel they were born in the wrong body.
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. There have always been people who defy gender norms. 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. On days he opts for only “boy” wear, he heads off with a little swagger. 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. 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. 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. For good measure, their e-mail included a link to information on gender-variant children. 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. 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. 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.