On Gender II

Decided to try to catch up on what was happening in the world outside my academic concerns and spent 40 minutes listening to NPR's series on transgendered children. (Made me think of Ma Vie en Rose.) Even for the more progressive among us, I think transgender is a hard thing to wrap one's mind around. We are just coming to terms with homosexuality, just barely. How to balance your child's personal fulfillment with the looming rejection of society? I can't imagine the deep deep pain of these decisions.

But let's take a step back. Let's forget about the terminology and the counselors and societal norms for a moment. Once upon a time, girls wore dresses and took Home Ec and eschewed sports and swearing. Bit by bit women donned pants and took up basketball and other manly pursuits and, while a few still cling to the classic notion of femininity (as they should be free to do), most of us happily inhabit a world in which women are free to be as "masculine" or "feminine" as they like.

At first glance, the idea of boys wanting to "be girls" as young as toddlers is alarming. Transgendered toddlers? Yikes! Yet how are they different from the "tomboys" of yore? I don't know that they want to be girls they just want to be free to do things that are currently off-limits to boys. The tales of these poor little boys being forced to omit lavender and pink from their drawings or to give their stuffed animals boy names instead of girls names is unsettling. It's just a color. It's just a name. But even I, of the babies can wear any color camp, still cannot bring myself to include pink in Baby Y's wardrobe. So I understand the parents' fear of the ridicule that these behaviors might elicit but what makes me sad is my belief that the real reason these behaviors are so discomforting is that still today masculine = superior and feminine = inferior.

Seriously, why is that women wearing pants is ok, but men wearing dresses makes us so profoundly nervous? If we took all the blue crayons out of little girls' drawing palette and refused to let them near a pair of pants - imagine how strangely uptight that would seem. Although the struggle for suffrage and independence for women in this country was no light task, it was made easier by the fact that aspiring to be like a man was at some level an admirable and understandable desire. Aspiring to be "like a woman", on the other hand, is puzzling. I think we subconsciously associate it with joining the losing team, so to speak. Despite all our progress, we have only come so far. And I find this point far more alarming than "transgendered toddlers".

... now back to our regular proramming...